***

Might there be at least a couple of those kitschy pseudo-nostalgic cocktails served at places like Kutscher’s Tribeca at the events marking the release of Marni Davis’ first book, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition? Davis, an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, turns the facts of American Jews in the liquor trade—from bootleggers and saloon keepers to kosher vintners and the very rare Jewish Prohibition enforcer—into a tale of prejudice, negotiation, and assimilation. Many American Jews, whether or not they cared to shoot back a thimbleful of schnapps after mussaf, were suspicious of the temperance movement and downright opposed to Prohibition, for good reason: These campaigns often drew upon anti-Semitic Protestant and nativist populism. The trick was for Jews not to let their comfort with the responsible enjoyment of alcohol and their investments in the liquor trade alienate them from other Americans. (Davis quotes a 19th-century rabbi who observed that “the Jew drinks, but he … knows when to stop.”) If you want a symbol of how deeply the liquor trade has mattered to American Jews, take note that the original library at Hebrew Union College, which trains Reform rabbis, was paid for by one of the prominent whiskey distillers of Louisville, Ky.

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If you pay attention to contemporary fiction—that is, if you read acknowledgment pages—you’ve likely seen Eileen Pollack’s name a lot. As a professor in, and sometimes director of, the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, she’s had her hand in books as diverse as Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s stories about contemporary Southeast Asia, Sightseeing, and Elizabeth Kostova’s blockbuster vampire romp, The Historian. Pollack’s own latest novel, Breaking and Entering, takes inspiration from her sojourn in the Midwest after a childhood in the Catskills: In the book, a couple of Californians relocate to Michigan, where they’re surrounded by weirdos and prison inmates who believe, for a couple of kooky examples, that Zionists bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building and that “the people we think of today as Jews are the counterfeit Israelites, spurred by jealousy to bring down the true chosen people, by which I mean the white Christian Aryan race.” Unlike Pollack, her characters aren’t always committed to educating Michiganders: “Explaining anything to morons like Sipp and Rosenkrantz,” one of the transplanted Californians—the Jewish one—thinks, in reference to a couple of his interlocutors, “is like banging your head against a wall, which … hurts you a lot more than it hurts anyone else.”

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What hurts in Ben Marcus’ novel The Flame Alphabet are the sounds of children’s voices. Kids’ speech is literally poisonous, a plague that kills adults. While this dystopian premise will probably feel eerily familiar to anyone who has been on a redeye flight across the aisle from a toddler, Marcus—known for books like The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women that luxuriate in language and defy description except, unsatisfactorily, as “experimental fiction”—is up to more than kvetching about the plight of exhausted, ear-strained parents. Like so many more conventional Jewish writers before him, he’s exploring the gap of communication between generations, and, unsurprisingly, the apocalyptic landscape he describes is littered with markers like the Beth Elohim Synagogue and a rabbi named Burke. Indeed, there’s some speculation, by the novel’s narrator, that the deadly linguistic “poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first.”

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Whatever you may think of Tony Judt—and, before his death in the summer of 2010, he managed to amass many more admirers, if also more vocal detractors, than the average academic historian of modern Europe—you can’t deny that he lived a fascinating and quintessentially 20th-century Jewish life. Born and raised in England, he summered on kibbutzim as a Zionist teenager and was trained as a historian of France, so he recognized how broad a perspective is necessary to understand modern Europe—he learned Czech late in his career to widen his own. His new book Thinking the Twentieth Century is comprised of conversations between Judt and Yale’s Timothy Snyder, and it was completed weeks before Judt’s death. It shows that his knowledge of languages remained partial: Unlike Snyder, he could not read primary sources in Polish or Ukrainian, which is why, he explains, he felt a collaboration with Snyder would be a valuable use of the limited time and energy he still had as he was dying of ALS. The book is a tribute to Judt’s energy and to his scholarly influence—and it’s surely not the last we’ll hear of him.

For neurotic parents freaked out about their kids’ development: Philip Schultz’s memoir My Dyslexia demonstrates that even a kid with learning disabilities, who couldn’t read until the fifth grade, can grow up to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

For the comic-book fan who needs a little help growing up: Created by a brother-sister team, Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s graphic novel Farm 54 describes in harrowing style growing up amid tragedies on a moshav, or settlement, in 1980s Israel.

For the aspiring New York intellectual: If they accomplish nothing else, Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook, should counter any youngster’s callow yearning for a more vibrant age of American Jewish culture, by making very clear just how lousy it felt to hang out at the Podhoretzes’ with Irving Kristol and Norman Mailer.

For the sports fan willing to go deeper than, say, Moneyball: In uncovering the role of Jews in running Negro Leagues baseball teams and then integrating the majors, Rebecca Alpert’s history Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball offers support to those who understand American athletics not just as bread and circuses but as a site for the negotiation of key racial and social relationships.

For the religious pedants you can’t avoid: If they’re constantly quoting a baraita at you, they might be interested to learn in Talya Fishman’s Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures that it was hardly inevitable that the Talmud would be transformed into the primary text of rabbinic Judaism.

For a friend in want of a good orgasm: Christopher Turner’s history Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America surveys the career and ideas of Wilhelm Reich, who evangelized for the psychological necessity of getting off.

For an American Jewish World Service-supporting exoticist: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s stories and essays, collected in Mongrels or Marvels, do more than revel in the charms and dangers of the East; they offer the insights of a Jewish woman who was born to Iraqi and Tunisian parents in 1917, raised in Cairo, and wrote exclusively in English while living in Israel.

For the Us Weekly devotee: It may not satisfy TMZ hardcores, but for milder celebrity junkies, Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness will allow your loved one to cook and eat a little like the Hollywood royalty descended from the Gaon of Nitzy-Novgorod.

For someone ignorant about Israeli and American culture who nonetheless insists on spouting off about the politics and culture of both countries: Yoram Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper, a genre-bending work of autobiographical fiction, introduces the reader to a young painter and veteran of the 1948 War of Israeli Independence who spent the 1950s hanging out with Miles Davis and Marlon Brando, and who reels off anecdotes of his youth idiosyncratically and with none of the comfortable clichés one might expect.

***

After watching Sophie’s Choice, Pauline Kael, the New Yorker movie critic who helped, perhaps more than anyone else—including even the relevant directors and actors—to define the American New Wave, remarked that “after I’ve seen [Streep] in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down.” The actress retorted, some years later: “You know what I think? … That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blond hair, and the heartlessness of them got her.” Now, that may or may not have been true; Kael’s biographer, Brian Kellow, points out in Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark that contrary to Streep’s insinuation, the critic had no trouble expressing admiration for other equally blonde, equally non-Jewish actresses, like Catherine Deneuve and Michelle Pfeiffer. Still, it does seem possible that Kael’s youth among Yiddish-speaking, immigrant chicken farmers in Petaluma, Calif., had some lasting effect on her cinematic tastes: Does her background help to explain, for example, her rapturous enthusiasm for Barbra Streisand’s saccharine, bastardized version of Yentl?

***

Cosell and Kael, children of immigrants, rose to the tops of their fields—or, more precisely, they reshaped those fields around their own personalities and talents—and it is with the myth of such ascension that Peter Orner’s second novel, Love and Shame and Love begins. As a teenager, Alexander Popper, son of a Highland Park, Ill., lawyer, is brought—as a local rite of passage into manhood—to an audience with Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, a heavyweight in the Chicago Democratic machine. The judge points “to a framed picture on his desk, a man and a woman dressed in black. Lined faces, hollow-eyed peasants from Lithuania. His parents.” The message, in short (and much in this longish novel is short: The chapters rarely last more than a page or two) is the promise of America: “From a Kentucky log cabin to the White House. From the shtetl to the U.S. Courthouse.” The novel then proceeds to the late 1980s, at which point Popper, at the University of Michigan (and, more specifically, in the basement of a structure that every Wolverine knows all too well, the aptly named UGLi) meets a girl, but the novel soon flashes back again, musing on the question of origin and inheritance, how we become who it is we turn out to be.

***

When Zalman Shazar, who would go on to become Israel’s third president, visited the United States in the early years of the Great Depression, he discovered something astonishing: a group of Americans with “complete mastery over the Hebrew language in all its depth and vitality as if they lived in the Land of Israel” and who “were utterly unreconciled and even oblivious to the surroundings in which they actually lived.” These men are the subjects of Alan Mintz’s magisterial new Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry, and, despite a recent wave of scholarship, their names probably still won’t be familiar. (A couple of them are most famous for their younger relatives: Abraham Regelson, for example, had Cynthia Ozick as his niece, and Simon Halkin was the uncle of Hillel Halkin, the essayist, critic, and translator of Sholem Aleichem.) These poets deserve to be known and read, if just for their audacity: As if writing dense Hebrew verse in Buffalo, Cleveland, and New Orleans was not challenge enough, one of them, Benjamin Silkiner, decided that because they lived among English speakers, it was up to the American Hebraists, rather than their peers in Palestine, to translate Shakespeare into Hebrew. Between 1911 and 1939, they managed to do so.

***

Why is it so much more interesting to read about the villainous than the virtuous? In The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco conjures a straw man on whom to pin just about every horror of late 19th-century Europe. His malevolent protagonist—who, like Hannibal Lecter, is something of a gourmet when he’s not sowing discord—is a French-Italian named Simone Simonini, and he manages to get up to some very nasty, very real tricks. He helps create The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous forgery beloved by anti-Semites from Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler to contemporary Islamic fundamentalists, and he has a hand in Alfred Dreyfus’ arrest, too. Eco has noted that “all the characters except one—the main character—really existed,” and it should be clear by now that stories with this structure (that is, historical picaresque: think Zelig or Forrest Gump or The Kindly Ones or Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic or, groan, Woody Allen’s latest, Midnight in Paris) fulfill a gently didactic function, like an adult-ed survey course with a decent teacher: By synthesizing history, and presenting it through the eyes of a stand-in for the reader, along with some comforting narrative trappings, these works flatter the intelligence of those audience members who already know a little of the history, and offer a basic introduction for the others. If it has worked for Allen and Robert Zemeckis, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also work for Eco.

Just about everybody who has ever written about Miller’s life and work has felt it necessary to wrestle with the complexities of his feelings about Jews. The most recent example is Evan Hughes’ account in Literary Brooklyn, which dutifully describes the “obvious, if increasingly complicated, anti-Semitism” of Miller in his teen years; the anti-Jewish fervor of his early novel Moloch; and the “suspect pro-Semitism” of the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. As the Brooklyn-born son of first-generation German-American Catholics, Miller grew up in a time and place where resentment of the Jews who were overrunning the borough was typical if not ubiquitous. In his career as a writer and in his letters to friends and colleagues, Miller committed to paper plenty of awful anti-Semitic slurs. But he also doted on his Jewish wife (whom he referred to, at times, as “the Jewish cunt”), had dozens of Jewish friends (some of whom he loathed), fantasized about having unknown Jewish ancestors, and adored Yiddish literature—not only the lionized Isaac Bashevis Singer but also figures much less widely known in English, like the humorist Moyshe Nadir.

More than enough ink has been spilled, then, on the vexed question of how Miller felt about Jews, both in general and specifically—not least by the man himself, who addressed the canard of his anti-Semitism regularly not only in books but also in his correspondence. (“The big point, after my death,” he remarked to one colleague in 1971, “will be—how to explain my extraordinary predilection for the Jews!” And an assurance to Erica Jong in 1974: “You must know I am not” anti-Semitic. She affirmed as much in her meditation on Miller as an influence and friend, The Devil at Large.)

Perhaps a better way to commemorate the anniversary of Cancer’s paperback release would be to consider the less-frequently treated question of what American Jews have thought of Miller. Especially because, as it turns out, if you happen to have a battered paperback of Cancer on your bookshelf—and you do, right?—there’s a better than even chance it was one Jew or another who made that possible.

The 1961 Grove publication of Miller’s previously banned novel—in paperback, no less, a format in which it would be expected to sell in pharmacies and grocery stores, in racks in bus stations, and anywhere else cheap books could be found—was probably the single ballsiest move in modern American publishing. The law wasn’t dead-set against “dirty books” by then; Grove’s publication, led by owner Barney Rosset, of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been vindicated by the courts only a year or so earlier. But nobody knew how the law of obscenity would react to Cancer, which went far beyond Lawrence’s explicit love-making to exuberant, filthy pensées on art, death, and the distinguishing features of Parisian prostitutes.

At its outset, the book devotes a famous passage to describing what Miller’s narrator wants to do to a woman he calls Tania (based on Bertha Schrank) and whom he has already described, on the book’s third page, as “the loveliest Jew.” “O Tania,” he cries, “where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed.”

It was that sort of thing that set U.S. law enforcement into motion upon Grove’s publication of Cancer. In many U.S. cities, the paperback never made it onto shelves. The attorney general of Rhode Island told local wholesalers to return shipments to the publisher, and they all did; the same thing happened in towns like Amarillo, Texas, and Norfolk, Va. In suburban Chicago, a police chief decided he didn’t want stores in his town, Mount Prospect, to sell Miller’s book, and he got nearby suburbs—Des Plaines, Arlington Heights, Lincolnwood, Niles, Skokie—to pull all the copies from the shelves, too. The lawsuits began.

Grove had promised financial and legal support to anyone arrested for selling or distributing Cancer, and the ACLU—defending an alleged dirty book for the first time in its history—helped out, too. In the ensuing months the book was the subject of more than 60 individual trials across the country. Judges weighed in on the question of whether the First Amendment protected Miller’s writing.

Many Jews spoke up in Miller’s defense, putting their careers on the line in supporting the book.

In Chicago, for instance, the Tropic of Cancer case was heard by Judge Samuel B. Epstein. A friend of notorious Mayor Richard J. Daley, Epstein was part of a family that perfectly symbolized the career trajectories of American Jews in successive generations. His father, Ephraim, had been educated at the Slobodka yeshiva and immigrated to Chicago to lead the Orthodox Congregation Anshei Kneseth; one of the judge’s sons, David, was a screenwriter blacklisted during the McCarthy purges.

Epstein might have been thinking of David, or he might have been thinking of his father’s landsleit who had not escaped Europe—Eichmann’s trial had been broadcast here just half a year earlier—when he noted in his decision that “recent history has proven the evil of an attempt at controlling the utterances and thoughts of our population.” Whatever his inspiration, Epstein ruled in favor of Americans’ right to buy and read Miller’s novel. The First Amendment lawyer Edward De Grazia has called Epstein’s decision “one of the best examples” of how some lawyers and judges transformed a few statements from a 1957 Supreme Court obscenity decision, Roth v. United States, into a sturdy First Amendment defense of dirty books that would protect not only Lawrence and Miller but also William Burroughs, the pornographic classic Fanny Hill, and eventually books like Portnoy’s Complaint, too.

Lots of other Jews had spoken up in favor of Miller’s novel: Richard Ellman and Harry Levin were among the literary scholars who testified to Cancer’s merits, and a number of the high-profile lawyers who tried the cases were Jewish ACLU members and stalwart free-speech advocates, including Elmer Gertz and Ephraim London. Grove’s chief counsel, who coordinated all the lawyers’ activities and tried a few of the appeals himself, was Norman Mailer’s cousin and literary agent, Charles “Cy” Rembar (né Zaremba), who would detail the controversies in his own popular book The End of Obscenity. Rosset, who had started the whole mess, funded Grove with money inherited from his father, a Jewish financier, and his edition of Cancer included a preface—referring to Miller as “the greatest living writer”—by Karl Shapiro, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet who just a few years earlier had published a rather unsubtly titled collection of verse, Poems of a Jew.

Bradley R. Smith, a Hollywood Boulevard bookseller who was arrested for selling Cancer (and who would go on to a career as a prominent Holocaust denier) went so far as to say that he received support, after his arrest, from “Jews from every walk of life.” Smith was defended by the great Los Angeles First Amendment advocate Stanley Fleishman, true, but his generalization is misleading—in the way anti-Semites’ generalizations tend to be. At Smith’s trial, one of the most celebrated and recognized Jews in America, Leon Uris, testified against Tropic of Cancer. “I don’t think [Miller] is a writer, and I don’t think this is a book,” the author of Exodus said on the stand. “I think it is the ramblings of a pervert. … We have a right to defend ourselves against this type of garbage the same way we would any other ordinary criminal or any pervert walking the streets of Los Angeles.”

It’s not difficult to understand why Uris, who insisted on a vision of Jews as manly conquerors and paragons of Judeo-Christian virtue, would object to Miller, who represents Jews—like everybody else—as carnal, dishonest, and debased, if also, like everyone else, possessing the potential for transcendence. The widespread support of Miller’s novel suggests, encouragingly, that at least among Jews in the literary and legal professions, it was not Uris’ but Miller’s perspective—which understood Jews to be human, fallible, neither better or worse than anybody else—that was the majority view.

With nearly half a century of fully legal Miller behind us, not everyone would agree with Shapiro that Miller was a modern “prophet.” But he was unquestionably prescient at least in knowing to whom he could appeal for sympathy. He remarked in Cancer itself, decades before any of his American trials would prove him right, that “the first people to turn to when you’re down and out are the Jews.”

That’s a lot of books but still a tiny fraction of the world’s overall literary output. (In the United States alone, 302,410 new books were published in 2009, according to one industry source, and that’s not including public domain reprints and other “non-traditional” titles.) Even if I covered more than most magazines or newspapers did during those two years—and as narrow as my focus was on titles with some connection, however tenuous, to Jews or to Judaism—“On the Bookshelf” was hardly exhaustive. Every month I had notes on another two dozen titles that would have been relevant to a column with more time and space, and there were always plenty of worthwhile books, like Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and Nadia Kalman’s The Cosmopolitans, that I would realize I’d missed only when they turned up in articles by other Tablet contributors.

A voracious reader could plow through the titles mentioned in “On the Bookshelf” at a clip of a Jewish book every day—Shabbat and Yom Kippur included—and would still end the year nearly a hundred titles behind schedule. And this without tackling, say, A Lethal Obsession, Robert Wistrich’s 1,200-page history of anti-Semitism, or Adam Levin’s 1,030-page debut novel, The Instructions. And while the number of books I dealt with in the column doesn’t qualify me as a budding Harold Bloom—who boasted, absurdly, that he was capable of reading up to 400 pages an hour—it does show that the publishing industry isn’t a corpse but a firehose.

Which is why I say that I “covered” the books: I didn’t read most of them. I served up an angle, or joke, or context for each title, based on what I could glean from skimming a galley, reading press releases and promotional excerpts, cribbing from the book publishing-industry trade magazines Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, or from a trawl of the blurbs, blogs, reviews, and interviews that proliferate on the Internet. Though “On the Bookshelf” has now been shelved, capsule book reviews continue to appear in the quarterly magazine Jewish Book World. Despite critics’ best efforts, though, the sheer number of new books being published makes even the sort of minor public acknowledgment I gave more than almost all authors can expect.

Some would gripe that many authors don’t deserve even this much recognition. And they probably don’t, when all they’re doing is churning out windy, under-researched polemics about the Middle East, or exploiting the tragedy of the Holocaust to gin up sales of undistinguished genre fiction, or cut-and-pasting yet another Bernard Madoff exposé in pursuit of a quick buck. But, as far as I could tell, even if most of the books covered in “On the Bookshelf” were far from immortal masterpieces, very few of them were without any merit whatsoever, without appeal to some readership, however niche.

You simply can’t publish this many books without producing at least a few original insights. Take the subject of Jewish sexuality, which seems like it was done to death a decade ago. Among the more unexpected books released in the past two years in this area are the first English-language history of a crucial German-Jewish condom magnate, a detailed and readable biography of the radical sex theorist Wilhelm Reich, and an unusual and impressively learned study of the representation of sexuality in the pseudepigraphic texts of ancient Jews and early Christians. New anthologies edited by Erica Jong, Danya Ruttenberg, and Amy Neustein have meanwhile offered insights into contemporary Jewish women’s sex lives, into the theology of Jewish lovemaking, and into the problem of pedophilia in Jewish communities. The voices of queer Jews have been heard much more loudly than ever before thanks to recent releases like Torah Queeries, a collection of Bible commentaries from LGBT perspectives; Andrea Myers’ The Choosing, a lesbian rabbi’s memoir; Keep Your Wives Away From Them, on the challenges faced by Orthodox lesbians; and Balancing on the Mechitza, about transgender Jews. However much you thought you knew from reading Portnoy’s Complaint and Fear of Flying about the ways Jews get off, this flurry of publishing shows how much more there is to discover.

The same could be said about Jews in sports. Even the most fanatical Jewish-baseball savant would learn something from Mark Kurlansky’s Hank Greenberg, Aaron Pribble’s Pitching in the Promised Land, Rebecca Alpert’s Out of Left Field, and Richard Michelson’s book for kids, Lipman Pike. And I find it difficult to believe that anyone knows so much about the legacy of Jews in professional basketball, bullfighting, and sports journalism not to be at least a little enlightened by Douglas Stark’s The SPHAS, Bart Paul’s Double-Edged Sword, and John Bloom’s There You Have It, respectively.

There were scores of contemporary Jewish novels, both highbrow and lowbrow, including important new work by Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Allegra Goodman, and Gary Shteyngart. Dozens of first novels appeared, too, by the likes of Austin Ratner, Julie Orringer, Sam Munson, Jacob Paul, Avner Mandelman, and Sharon Pomerantz—any one of whom might turn out, two or three more novels down the road, to be as powerful a literary force as a Roth or an Ozick.

The productivity is nothing short of staggering, when you stop to think about it. Imagine you want a book on Maimonides, the medieval doctor, theologian, and philosopher, and you don’t want an old dusty one from the mid-2000s. You can still choose from no fewer than half a dozen brand-new or newly reissued biographies, released since mid-2009, almost all of them aimed not just at professional scholars but also at the smart general reader. And that’s not to mention focused analyses of Maimonidean thought, books in Hebrew and other languages, or new editions of the man’s own works.

Maybe all that the proliferation of Rambam books reflects is that there are now hundreds of Jewish Studies scholars at universities around the world whose positions require them to churn out new monographs as often as possible, along with a substantial number of nonacademic Jewish authors and journalists, both religious and secular, who can’t resist grappling with a figure as influential as Maimonides. But this itself is something to celebrate—when, in history, have there ever been more professional, full-time Jewish writers?—and it also suggests that the common pool of knowledge about Jewish life, culture, and thought will continue to grow deeper, year by year, and page by page.

Literary superabundance does present a real threat to authors: As more books are published, less attention can be devoted to each one as an individual achievement. So, one suspects it’s with them that the gripes about the death of the book originate. But from a committed reader’s perspective, there has never been a more vibrant literary marketplace: Books are more plentiful, cheaper, and easier to find than ever before. Anyone kvetching about the death of the book is just giving him- or herself a half-assed excuse for not reading more of them. The rest of us are busy enjoying a literary renaissance.

Every adolescence has its own special miseries, the Jewish ones no less so than the non. Philip Schultz, who won the 2008 Pulitzer for poetry, struggled with dyslexia, and this was a problem for him not only at school—he didn’t learn to read until the fifth grade—but also at home. As he explains in My Dyslexia (Norton, September), “I couldn’t learn Hebrew for the same reason I couldn’t learn English, or anything else. And not knowing Hebrew felt even worse. It was a failure not only in my eyes and the eyes of my parents but in the eyes of God too.”

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The teenaged Emma Goldman had other problems: When she was 12, a teacher in her school in Konigsberg declared her “a terrible child who would grow into a worse woman,” and that was the end of her formal education; a few years later, after her father told her that “all a Jewish girl need know is how to make gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give her husband babies,” she threatened to commit suicide if not allowed to accompany her sister to America. In Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale, September), Vivian Gornick rehearses these details from Red Emma’s youth, offering an overview of the career of an iconic anarchist.

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Schultz’s and Goldman’s issues were small potatoes, though, compared to what Jack Pool has to deal with on his 16th birthday in Shirley Reva Vernick’s young-adult historical novel The Blood Lie (Cinco Puntos, September). Drawing upon real-life events that took place in the town of Massena, N.Y., in September 1928, Vernick has Jack accused of murdering a gentile girl discovered missing on Shabbat Shuva.

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The hardship faced by Sacha Kessler, the teenaged protagonist of The Inquisitor’s Apprentice (Harcourt, October), meanwhile, is more fanciful: It results from his ability to see witchcraft that other denizens of turn-of-the-century New York cannot. Because of this talent, Sacha is compelled to assist a New York Police Department Inquisitor in preventing magical crimes (does wholesale Harry Potter imitation count?). As Sacha’s uncle, an avid reader of the Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker, observes, “Only in America can Jewish boys grow up to become cogs in the anti-Wiccan machine just like gentiles!”

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Another new historical novel for young-adult readers, Vicky Alvear Shecter’s Cleopatra’s Moon (Arthur A. Levine, August), features as its heroine the only daughter of the famed Cleopatra VII. While her mom was the last pharaoh of Egypt, and a girlfriend of Mark Antony and Julius Caesar, the young Cleopatra Selene receives a royal education, including a field trip with her tutor to meet with a rabbi “who will explain the tenets of the Hebrew religion.” You know, that whole weird monotheism thing.

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The latest major biographical treatment of Cleopatra VII, soon to be available in paperback, is Stacy Schiff’s 2010 hit Cleopatra: A Life (Back Bay, September), which notes, among other things, that one 19th-century historian errs in having called her “a loose girl of sixteen” when she met Caesar, when she was really “an intensely focused woman of twenty-one.” Schiff’s adolescence has been the subject of some disagreement, too. In 2000, on the heels of winning the Pulitzer for her biography of Vladimir Nabokov and his (Jewish) wife Vera, Schiff told an interviewer that spending her teenage years in “one of three Jewish families” in the Northern Berkshires mill town of Adams, Mass., was “a little alienating” and one reason that she’s “always writing about refugees, people out of sync.” A blogger has since pointed out that the celebrated biographer seems to have gotten the facts of her own childhood wrong, in that North Adams boasts a synagogue with a long, rich history and a congregation that one can safely assume is larger than the three families Schiff remembered.

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The trials of adolescence can, of course, anticipate adult triumphs. As a 13-year-old in Hamburg in 1896, living in a Shabbat- and kashrut-observant Jewish home, James Franck broke his arm and “decided to go—without asking his parents—to the Physikalisches Staatslaboratorium (State Physical Laboratory) … to have his arm examined with the rays” that had, only a year before, been proved capable of producing images of bones beneath people’s skin. This anecdote, and the X-ray picture of Franck’s arm, can both be found in J. Lemmerich’s Science and Conscience: The Life of James Franck (Stanford, August), which describes Franck’s discoveries in the field of physics and chemistry—he won the Nobel Prize in the former field in 1925, and he later participated in the Manhattan Project—as well as his admirable if unsuccessful attempts to convince President Truman and the U.S. government not to deploy the nuclear bomb he had helped invent.

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Richard Feynman (1918-1988) also contributed to the Manhattan Project, and he won the Nobel Prize in Physics 40 years after Franck. He was the sort of Far Rockaway-raised son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who, as a teenager, decided to develop his own personal system of symbols for trigonometry because he didn’t like the standard notation. He turned out to be a safe-cracker, bongo drummer, habitué of strip clubs, and a painter, too: In general, he was what used to be called a “colorful character”—so it is highly fitting that his life has been rendered in comic-book style as Feynman (First Second, August), written by Jim Ottaviani and drawn, in full color, by Leland Myrick. After he won the Nobel, having to explain why he didn’t wish to be listed in a book of “Jewish Winners,” Feynman referred back to the decision he made, aged 13, to drop “out of Sunday school just before confirmation”: He rejected the idea “that the Jewish people are in any way ‘the chosen people,’ ” or “that there is a true Jewish race or specific Jewish hereditary character.”

Yiddish isn’t dead; if anything, it’s undead. Think about it: Is there anything more unkillable, vaguely erotic, ridiculous, and toothy than the language of the Ashkenazim? In fact, a book published this spring—Sara Libby Robinson’s Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors Before World War I (Academic Studies, March)—argues that Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the single most recognizable undead gentleman in history, was, as Allan Nadler phrases it, a reflection of “widespread anxieties about the dangers posed by the flood (and the blood) of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Great Britain.”

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Like Dracula, Yiddish may be a little pale (and allergic to crucifixes), but it’s not going anywhere: Witness Lily Kahn’s Colloquial Yiddish (Routledge, August). “Colloquial,” mind you, meaning: everyday, casual, informal, the kind of Yiddish you speak with your friends when you’re just hanging out at the mall. The book, by a University College London Ph.D. and language instructor, can be purchased with audio accompaniment on CD (talk about something that’s dead) or, more sensibly for the century we live in, as an MP3 download.

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This spring also saw what seems to have been the first volume of Yiddish poetry to have been funded on Kickstarter: Zackary Sholem Berger’s bilingual זאָג כאָטש להבֿדיל /Not in the Same Breath (Yiddish House, May), a varied, clever collection that works equally well for those poor souls who speak only English as it does for yidish-reders. Berger, whose previous projects include translations of The Cat in the Hat and Curious George into Yiddish, knows a thing or two about breath: In his other, equally impressive career, as a doctor and medical researcher at Johns Hopkins, one of his published articles concerns the “Prevalence of workplace exacerbation of asthma symptoms in an urban working population of asthmatics.”

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Even the Yiddish literary classics—a wonderful selection of which, edited by Ken Frieden, is now available as a paperback: Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz (Syracuse, September)—remain vigorous and open to new readings. Marc Caplan’s How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms (Stanford, September), for instance, demonstrates how European Yiddish literary texts by authors including Yisroel Aksenfeld, Isaac Meyer Dik, and Y. Y. Linetski resonate with and complement African English and French ones by the likes of Amos Tutuola, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Camara Laye, and Ahmadou Karouma. The comparison isn’t random: All these literatures were written by people with rich oral storytelling traditions who were subject to the whims of imperial regimes.

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That even the most familiar brands of Yiddish—American, leftist, World of Our Fathers-ish—can be newly animated is the message of Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle’s Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land (Abrams, September), which renders chestnuts of Yiddish cultural history—Paul Robeson’s hotel room encounter with Itzik Feffer in Soviet Moscow; the controversy regarding Sholem Asch’s novels about Christ—in underground comix form. Among the book’s other contents are gorgeous comix-style portraits of Yiddish writers by Dan Archer and the full text, with occasional illustrations, of “The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum.” It says something—it’s not clear what—that Pekar’s last project was a love letter to his mother tongue.

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Yiddishkeit (vaguely: Jewishness) comes in a variety of forms, not just the socialist/Communist ones that Buhle (if not Pekar) heavily favors. An example of how Yiddish functioned in one American childhood appears in Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (Biblioasis, September), by the novelist, screenwriter, and raconteur Bruce Jay Friedman. “My father hit me just once,” Friedman recalls, “which is not a bad score for a Depression boy. The blow was sudden, unexpected. It knocked me halfway across the street. I’d used a slang word, putz, though I had no idea it meant penis.”

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There is a danger, of course, of overemphasizing Yiddish to the exclusion of other languages spoken by Jewish communities; German-speaking Jews, for one example, tend not to be sufficiently recognized for their lasting contributions to American Jewish life. Attending to one of their achievements, Cornelia Wilhelm’s The Independent Orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters: Pioneers of a New Jewish Identity, 1843-1914 (Wayne State, July) examines how a German-Jewish fraternity founded in the middle of the 19th century anticipated and addressed many of the challenges that modern Jews have faced since then.

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Or, for another case of a neglected language, take the dialect of the Jews of Northwest Persia, which “bears a close resemblance to that of the Urmi Syrians,” according to Arthur John Maclean’s 1895 handbook, now available as a print-on-demand title from Cambridge University Press (or, more sensibly, free from Google Books), called Grammar of the Dialects of the Vernacular Syriac (Cambridge, June). To illustrate the similarity, Maclean excerpts an Odessan’s translation of a couple of the Psalms into the Judeo-Azerbaijani vernacular. Where’s the indie comix anthology about that?

“Post-Holocaust” is one of those unavoidable terms, like postmodern and postcolonial, that generates more conceptual problems than it solves—when, exactly, is the post-Holocaust period?—but it does reflect how much of the scholarly, literary, and popular attention that seems to be Holocaust-focused actually concerns itself not with the genocide itself but with what happened afterward. Anna Holian’s first book, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Michigan, June), for example, attends to the 8 million displaced persons who found themselves in Germany in the spring of 1945, and especially to the Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews who were refugees in Bavaria, under American control. While these former death-camp inmates and prisoners of war waited for the world to figure out what to do with them, thousands of Nazis were evading justice by smuggling themselves across the Tyrolean Alps into Italy and from there to obscurity in the Americas. According to Gerald Steinacher’s Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford, June), such criminals as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele managed to do so thanks to help from folks at the Red Cross, the Catholic church, and, eventually, the CIA, who sometimes, if not always, recognized that they were helping war criminals escape arrest.

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One of the most difficult questions that remained after the war was how we should feel about Jews who served on Judenrat, collaborating with the Nazis in the hopes either of saving their own skins or, in some cases, improving conditions for their coreligionists. The thorniness of this issue explains why we now have, along with consideration by such thinkers as Primo Levi, Y. Y. Trunk, and Hannah Arendt, two major, full-length fictional treatments of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, leader of the Lodz ghetto: The first was Leslie Epstein’s tragicomic King of the Jews, published in 1979, and the new one, translated from Swedish, is Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies (FSG, August). In an afterword, Sem-Sandberg notes that “most of the testimonies of people who outlived Rumkowski … portray him as an unscrupulous careerist and collaborator who would go to some lengths to implement the decisions of the Nazi powers. And yet there was clearly a point at which even Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski felt obliged to look away and say no.” The novel “revolves around that moment.”

One of the stories translated and collected in Regrowth: Seven Tales of Jewish Life Before, During, and After Nazi Occupation (Northwestern, June), written by the great Soviet Yiddish author Der Nister—famed as the author of obscure symbolist fictions and also the translator of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytales into Yiddish—also concerns a Judenrat member, one not so reprehensible as Rumkowski but engaged in enough morally questionable behavior that his daughter feels she must right his wrongs in the resistance.

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One oft-neglected post-Holocaust milestone, which signaled the growth in American interest in the genocide even before the Eichmann trial riveted the nation, was the selection of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by the Book of the Month Club, in 1960, which propelled it, proto-Oprah-like, to massive best-sellerdom. Journalist Steve Wick relies on Shirer’s letters and diaries in The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Palgrave Macmillan, August) to tell the story of his sojourn in Nazi Germany and the journalism he produced there. According to Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, Wick shares with his subject an ability to craft compelling narratives, but also a tendency to trip on the facts (Shirer was vilified by academics, and Evans says that Wick’s book is “full of errors”).

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Novelists can’t help but stretch the post-Holocaust as far as it will go, teasing out the consequences of Nazi-era moral dilemmas into the present. Two current examples: Lawrence Douglas’ The Vices (Other, August), the sophomore novel by a legal scholar who has analyzed Holocaust war crimes trials, begins with the mysterious death of Oliver Vice; as the narrator attempts to explain why a successful 41-year-old philosopher would disappear, one important clue is the fact that “Weiss” is “a typical German Jewish surname” that is “pronounced—,” well, refer back to the title. Pam Jenoff, also a lawyer, has made a career intertwining Holocaust-era plots with contemporary ones in such novels as Almost Home and A Hidden Affair, while also penning the more straightforward historical romances The Kommandant’s Girl and The Diplomat’s Wife. Her latest, The Things We Cherished (Doubleday, July), has both contemporary and historical elements and focuses on the amours of two litigators charged with defending a wealthy man accused of having committed war crimes in WWII.

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A Holocaust victim lives on, nonfictionally, in Deborah Masel’s Soul to Soul: Writings From Dark Places (Gefen, August), an Australian Jewish educator’s chronicle of life with metastatic breast cancer. Masel—who, sadly, passed away last week—found inspiration in the face of death in the Warsaw ghetto leader, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, who was shot in the Trawinki work camp in 1943. Masel herself edited one volume of his teachings, and, as she notes, he taught “that even after a teacher has died, when students study his works his lips will move in the grave.” Masel has kept Shapira alive, then, and Masel’s readers will do the same for her.

The news this month has shown, once again, how tricky it can be to tell Jews and Christians apart: a community of Majorcans, who have been Catholic for, oh, about 700 years, turned out to be Jewish according to ultra-Orthodox authorities, while Glenn Beck, addressing the Knesset in Israel, intoned the iconic words from the Book of Ruth that inspire and often figure in conversion ceremonies (“Your people is my people / Your God is my God”) but remains, nonetheless, steadfastly, creepily, vaguely Christian.

Complicating these matters further is the first book by Bible scholar Matthew Thiessen, titled Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Oxford, July), which argues that “for many Jews in antiquity Jewishness was a matter of genealogy. Gentiles could not become Jews regardless of whether or not they underwent circumcision.” Even back then, no one agreed about what makes somebody Jewish.

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Today, there’s general agreement at least that conversion to Judaism is possible, even if there’s still plenty of disagreement among authorities across the religious spectrum about what constitutes an acceptable conversion. Reconstructionist Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben and Jennifer S. Hanin don’t want anyone to let that get them down on their way to joining the tribe, so their cheery guidebook, Becoming Jewish: The Challenges, Rewards, and Paths to Conversion (Rowman & Littlefield, September) shepherds eager aspirants onward with sections like “Facing the Bet Din: Don’t Sweat It.” Most remarkably, this has got to be the only book ever co-written by an ordained rabbi published with a foreword by the incomparable Bob Saget.

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There’s no question, by now, that scholars of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity need to be reading and contemplating the same sources, as well as one another’s work. In Ann Astell and Sandor Goodheart’s edited collection Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Notre Dame, June), experts on the history of one or both of these religions—including such heavy hitters as Erich Gruen, Michael Fishbane, Robert Daly, and Bruce Chilton—riff on the theories about violence and imitation developed by the French Académicien and Stanford campus eminence René Girard. Meanwhile, Randi Rashkover, director of the Judaic Studies Program at George Mason University, brings Jewish-Christian comparativism into the high theory present: She contests recent arguments by academic superstars like Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek about Paul and the abolition of Jewish law in Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics (Fordham, September).

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Likewise comparative, and more appetizing, is David Freidenreich’s Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law (California, August), a study that explores the ways that the quotidian rituals of breaking bread have served as a means of identification and exclusion in the three monotheistic faiths. Everybody knows that kashrut functions socially—have you heard about the time Rabbi Akiva avoided a honey-pot trap because he smelled trayf on the breath of the ladies sent to seduce him?—but Friedenreich, an ordained Conservative rabbi and assistant professor at Colby College, offers extensive treatments of the aims and effects of Christian and Muslim laws about culinary consumption, too.

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Freidenreich focuses on ancient and medieval religious authorities, but obviously food has continued to serve its function, shoring up religious identity and demarcating social boundaries, in modernity as well. Frederick Isaac’s  A Road of Our Own Choosing: A History of Reform Judaism in America (URJ, June) offers wider context for the Trefa Banquet of 1883, but there’s a reason that the serving of little neck clams and soft-shell crabs to the attendees of a rabbinic ordination ceremony in Cincinnati has become an iconic moment in the history of American Judaism. At the same time, the title of Yoel Finkelman’s new book, Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature, Artscroll, and the Construction of Ultra-Orthodox Identity (Academic Studies, August), reflects how resonant culinary metaphors can be; here it speaks to literary, rather than gustatory, practices. In the book, Finkelman, who teaches Torah at progressive Orthodox institutions in Israel including ATID and Midreshet Lindenbaum, follows Jeremy Stolow’s Orthodox by Design, in attending to Artscroll as exemplary of the way the ultra-Orthodox community draws on secular cultural models.

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How post-Enlightenment Germans, both “Jewish-identified” and “ ‘Jew’-identifying” ones, have distinguished Jewish from non-Jewish bodies is the subject of Jay Geller’s The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (Fordham, September). Geller is known for his supple and richly informed readings of Freud; here he addresses a host of other writers, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Arthur Dinter, analyzing the body as the site of Jewishness, as well as the appropriation of anti-Semitic tropes by Jews who were trying to figure out who they were. Don’t expect any of this scholarship to simplify matters when it comes to figuring out who’s Jewish and who’s not: That will inevitably remain a puzzle as long as there are any Jews to argue about it.

Summer seems as opportune a time as any for publishers to drum up interest in fantasy and adventure: If people didn’t want escapism, would they be so ardent about planning beach vacations? Lev Grossman’s The Magician King (Viking, August) addresses itself to this desire to get away, intertwining the wonderment of a world very much like the one in C. S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader with some of the most emphatically unmagical details of urban life (like, sigh, Track Changes). A sequel to the 2009 best-seller, The Magicians—a book that inspired one critic to wonder “why there is no Jewish Narnia”—the new novel will likely earn Grossman more of J.K. Rowling’s maturing fans and, if nothing else, confirm him as the most commercially successful of the many authors in his own family.

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Asked by a ThrillerFest attendee whether his new novel, The Twelfth Enchantment (Random House, August), would be “Lev Grossman-esque,” David Liss demurred but went on to clarify that he does respect The Magicians: “What I really appreciated about that book was he wanted to really grapple with what Harry Potter novels don’t: Which is, if this stuff were real, what does it mean psychologically? What does it do to the human psyche to be able to perform these incredible things?” Liss has been known, until now, for page-turning historical fictions involving financial chicanery in which Jews regularly feature, including a character based on the 18th-century pugilist Daniel Mendoza. His latest book introduces otherworldly magic into a setting familiar from Jane Austen’s novels (but Liss does this much more thoughtfully than all those recent slapdash Austen homages).

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Edward Ifkovic’s Escape Artist (Poisoned Pen, June) offers escapism without any actual magic: It’s the second of Ifkovic’s novels to feature Edna Ferber as a sleuth, and it takes place when the middlebrow-novelist-to-be is still a 19-year-old cub reporter, unaware that literary fame awaits her. As if it’s not compelling enough just to imagine the woman who would grow up to be the author of Fanny Herself and So Big as a detective, Harry Houdini also co-stars. Ifkovic sets the tale in Appleton, Wisc., where Ferber and Houdini both spent time; the latter claimed, falsely, to have been born there, rather than in Budapest.

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First published in England in 2008 to some acclaim, R.J. Ellory’s crime thriller A Simple Act of Violence (Overlook, June), like Ifkovic’s mystery, features a Jewish sleuth. One of Ellory’s two D.C. homicide detectives, who pursue a serial killer with C.I.A. ties, is said to be “holding onto [his] Jewish heritage by [his] fingernails”; the other cultivates a relationship with an elderly couple, “these strange old Jewish folk, like surrogate parents.”

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In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, satirical exaggerations and impossible paradoxes reflect not flights of fantasy but the insanity of war as filtered through Heller’s dark sense of humor. In a new memoir, Erica Heller describes what it was like to be on the receiving end of that sense of humor when she growing up, as the author’s daughter, in a landmark building on New York’s Upper West Side. Titled Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22 (Simon & Schuster, August), the book dishes on the life Heller lived after writing one of the most celebrated novels of the 20th century, including his meals with such luminaries as Mel Brooks and Zero Mostel.

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There are traumas even more impossible to comprehend than the absurd military campaigns Heller immortalized, and techniques drawn from literary fantasy can serve as the means for making sense of such historical events. Or so Jenni Adams argues in Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real (Palgrave Macmillian, August), in which she attends particularly to recent international best-sellers by young writers, including Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.

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Of course, pulpy thrillers (not to mention the Indiana Jones movies and lots of video games) love to ladle supernaturalism into stories that are ostensibly about the menace of Nazism, too, simply to gin up readers’ interest. In The 34th Degree (Simon & Schuster, June), for example, Thomas Greanias sends an Israeli counterterrorism expert, fresh from a time-traveling expedition to ancient Judea, back to the year 1943, where he can snatch a lost book of the Bible and its supernatural powers out of the hands of the S.S.

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Is it less fun when fiction addresses the issues of the day responsibly, without fantasy, as in Amy Waldman’s The Submission (FSG, August)? Here, the “grandson of a Russian Jewish peasant” chairs a committee tasked with selecting the design for a 9/11 memorial. In Waldman’s rewrite of current events, the winning architect is an American Muslim (rather than the IDF veteran whose design was actually chosen); much hang-wringing and political point-scoring ensues. The chairman’s wife notes, for example, that “a Muslim country would never let a Jew build its memorial,” while a Bangladeshi woman notes that “an American designed our parliament in Dhaka” (an American, it should be said, whose birth name was Leiser-Itze Schmuilowsky). While Waldman draws upon her experience as a journalist for the New York Times and Atlantic, the novel, like any work of fiction, does partake of the prerogatives of fantasy—if only in the sense that it allows her to explore intense questions of local and global politics without being hampered by any pesky facts.

Their task was to master Wolfenstein 3D, the 1993 computer game that confronted its players with a heavily pixilated, mech-suited Fuhrer strapping large guns, and proved to game developers that a “first-person shooter”—a game in which players navigate three-dimensional worlds, in first- and third-person perspectives, mowing down foes with machine guns, chainsaws, and plasma cannons—could be a massive hit. In the years since, the genre has become one of the most popular and highly grossing entertainment formats of all time, with yearly sales in the billions of dollars. With such success has come, inevitably, controversy: The Columbine killers played a follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D before their rampage, increasing concerns about the effects of video games on children and teenagers.

When the Supreme Court published its decision in the case of Brown v. EMA at the end of last month, the Justices ruled against a California statute prohibiting the sale or rental of violent video games to people under the age of 18. Once again, a sturdy American paradox was reaffirmed, one that was articulated perspicaciously 62 years ago by an iconoclastic cultural critic named Gershon Legman. “Sex,” he noted, “which is legal in fact, is a crime on paper, while murder—a crime in fact—is, on paper, the best seller of all time.”

If Legman is remembered at all today, it is usually as the foremost modern collector and theorist of dirty jokes. But his strange, varied career also included a great deal of advocacy on behalf of origami and a stint collecting erotic publications for Alfred Kinsey. Love & Death: A Study in Censorship, published in 1949, was his most influential book, despite being self-published and suppressed by the U.S. Post Office. It was taken seriously enough that two chapters were translated in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes in Paris, while the poet William Carlos Williams included it in his list of that year’s 10 best books in the New York Times.

It’s of little wonder: In 1949, censorship was rampant, enabled by the 1873 Comstock laws, which made it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material through the mail. So vigorously were the laws enforced that in 1948 a book of short stories by Edmund Wilson—at that point, the nation’s most highly respected literary critic—was suppressed because of its mildly erotic content. But whereas sex made censors jumpy, violence never had. Laws advocated vigilance on both fronts—New York, for example, passed legislation in 1884 that prohibited the distribution of “accounts of criminal deeds … or deeds of bloodshed”—but though both comic books and pulp novels included detailed depictions of gruesome murders, the laws were never enforced.

And that infuriated Legman. To illustrate his point, he quoted a sample from an early story by Edgar Allan Poe that features an old lady’s corpse that has been “fearfully mutilated,” “with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off.”

“This is legal,” Legman fulminated. “This is printable. This is classic.”

Legman’s objection to murder mysteries turns out to have been uncanny in its anticipation of the first-person-shooter genre as it would develop decades later. Legman warned that mysteries inculcate the same habit of mind that is required for genocide: the strategic dehumanization of a particular person or group of people, whose torture and murder can then be executed without the slightest pang of guilt. The target of such animus, he argued, is not the victim whose death initiates the mystery’s plot, but the murderer him or herself, whom the detective—and, vicariously, the reader—hunts down and destroys.

“By casting one living individual into the character of a murderer,” Legman wrote, “he is thrown automatically outside the pale of humanity, and neither justice nor mercy need be shown him.”

The creators of Wolfenstein 3D intuited this point beautifully: By populating a castle with history’s most despicable murderers, Nazis, they gave their game’s players permission not just to read or to watch revenge killings passively but to mete out death themselves, energetically, glorying in every victim’s dying shriek, convulsion, and squirt of blood. John Romero, one of the game’s creators—in a conversation recalled in David Kushner’s 2003 book Masters of Doom—demonstrated this very spirit. “Hey,” Romero yelled out to a roomful of fellow programmers, “you know what we should have in here? Pissing! We should have it so you can fucking stop and piss on the Nazi after you mow him down!”

Many shooters have since dehumanized their enemies by presenting them as humanoid aliens, robots, or monsters, but the main idea has remained consistent with Legman’s vision: shunting a whole class of human-shaped targets “outside the pale of humanity,” as he wrote, so that “neither justice nor mercy need be shown” them. Legman noted, sardonically, that the reader of murder mysteries “kills three hundred times a year—daily except Sunday—generally just before going to bed.” He would have been astonished to learn that the typical gamer can perform those same 300 executions in a half-hour of play in horde mode.

As the son of an immigrant shokhet, or kosher butcher—the majority of whose Hungarian relatives had recently been slaughtered by Nazis who had first systematically dehumanized them—Legman could not take lightly the representations of violence he found on sale in drug stores and supermarkets. “In the same way,” he wrote, “Germans were given to understand that Jews are not human and, as such, can properly be gassed, electrocuted, and incinerated wholesale.” Comic books—which he called the “kiddies’ korner in this new national welter of blood”—do not, he argued, lack “any of the trappings of the Naziism”: They give “every American child a complete course in paranoid megalomania such as no German child ever had, a total conviction of the morality of force such as no Nazi could even aspire to.”

If all this sounds a trifle hyperbolic, that’s part of the charm of Legman’s prose. But it’s also worth pointing out that he wasn’t alone in his reactions to the grisly, and still fresh, facts of World War II. Several German-Jewish intellectuals in America felt similarly: Most famously, the psychologist Frederic Wertham led an infamous and rather successful crusade against the horrors of comic books, while the Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and even a future prophet of the sexual revolution, Wilhelm Reich, also remarked upon the fascistic tendencies of American popular culture.

One can only imagine Legman’s apoplectic reaction had he sat down to play Wolfenstein 3D before his death in 1999. When I asked my students, some of whom are grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, how they felt about playing the game, several admitted how gratifying it was to pop around a corner, sight a Nazi, fire, and watch him crumple to the ground in a bloody heap. One, who never quite got the hang of the controls, said that it had been torturous to watch the brownshirts murder her, again and again, just as real life Nazis had slaughtered so many of her relatives. The students quickly grasped the game’s central Legmanian irony: It forces the player, busily slaughtering Nazis, to commit a virtual mass murder that is genocidal in its character. No human (or animal, or demon) ever appears in Wolfenstein 3D whom the player is not expected to murder as quickly and violently as possible.

With his canny perception of the violence of pop culture, Legman anticipated the central argument made by the advocates of the California law. If we have agreed that it is necessary to protect children from sexual images, they argue, why, then, should it be illegal to protect children from exposure to realistic images of beheadings, stabbings, and gleeful dismemberings? California’s brief referred repeatedly to Ginsberg v. New York, the 1968 case of a Long Island luncheonette owner bamboozled into selling a few girlie magazines to a 16-year-old, in which the Supreme Court had declared that its recent decisions invalidating the obscenity laws—which had previously kept Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Fanny Hill off bookstore shelves—did not mean that shopkeepers could now sell pornography to kids. The court made clear, in Ginsberg, that different standards could be used to decide what material minors had a right to see, and later decisions—FCC v. Pacifica (1978), Bethel v. Fraser (1986), and most recently Fox v. FCC (2009)—reaffirmed the need to shield children from what the law has called obscenity and indecency: graphic sexual representations and four-letter words.

Relying on these decisions, the State of California argued in its brief to the Supreme Court that because we agree that the culture children consume influences their behavior, then dangerous or antisocial representations must be censored and that “it should make no constitutional difference whether the material depicts sex or violence.” Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting, agreed, remarking that he finds “no difference—historical or otherwise,” relevant to the arguments in Brown v. EMA, between “descriptions of physical love” and “descriptions of violence.” Legman already considered this, six decades ago, in Love & Death: “If he & she who read of sex will try it out when no one is watching,” he wrote, “why will not they who read of murder try that too when they have the chance?”

Still, Legman’s opposition to the violence of popular culture notwithstanding, it’s no surprise he wasn’t cited as an authority in the lengthy bibliography Breyer appended to his dissent, or, for that matter, anywhere else in Brown v. EMA. Unlike Wertham—and, surprisingly, even Reich—Legman never advocated censorship. Instead, he predicted that in a society with less pervasive sexual repression, people would be less frustrated and would have less need to turn to violence for satisfaction in their popular culture.

Legman did not believe, as most opponents of censorship do not believe, that the culture we consume has no effect upon us; if that were true, there would be no incentive to defend freedom of expression. But he refused to accept the premise of cultural consumption as what psychologists call an “ideomotor,” as an unstoppable force compelling media consumers to reenact the actions they witness in novels, movies, or comic books. Much of the current debate boils down to this issue, and, all the contributions of social scientists notwithstanding, the debate splits predictably: Those with a dim view of human nature call for censorship, while those with faith in individual will and the possibilities of art agitate against it.

While Legman’s book can’t help to settle this perennial question—a crank and weirdo, Legman had disturbing ideas about latent homosexuals, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone finding in his work the answers to dilemmas that remain unresolved by philosophy and social science—he does help to clarify that the pressing problem raised by Brown v. EMA has nothing to do with censorship but with our preferences and desires. Other examples proliferate in which American children are exposed to intense violence but protected from images of sex, whether it’s a librarian recommending Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns to pre-teen boys but excluding Will Eisner’s A Contract With God because of its sexual images, or the MPAA rating a grisly film PG-13 while branding another NC-17 due to a chaste homosexual kiss.

The real question, then, is why we love violence and hate sex so much, and so consistently, in the United States. Why do we feed the former to our young children in heaping doses while we labor intently, and with almost total unanimity, to shield them from the latter? We continue to send 18-year-olds by the thousands to fight wars that, on the ground, increasingly resemble violent video games, and we continue to arrest teenagers for engaging in consensual sex. Legman’s paradox is alive and well, ratified as law by the highest court in the land, in 2011.

It wouldn’t be the summer concert season without absurd ticket prices, or, for that matter, without ticketing systems that everybody loves to hate. Among other things, Dean Budnick and Josh Baron explain why service fees are more expensive than the tickets themselves in Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped (ECW, June). Given that American Jews turned ticket sales into an art in the heyday of vaudeville and the nickelodeon, it seems appropriate that they also contributed to the field’s modernization: Budnick and Baron’s tale begins in 1966, when the Bronfman family bankrolled a computer hardware expert named Harvey Dubner to develop an electronic sales system, and then takes off in 1982 when a lawyer, Fred Rosen, centralized ticketing for sports and concert venues, tacking on fees and building his company, Ticketmaster, into an industry juggernaut with ticket sales reaching almost $2.5 billion per year.

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Cashing in on massive concert tours was not always de rigeur for pop musicians. Take Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, two members of the Jewish AEPi fraternity, whose names some record execs at first considered “too Jewish-sounding.” The duo gave only seven concerts in 1970 in support of Bridge Over Troubled Water, according to David Browne’s Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970 (Da Capo Press, June), which contextualizes four classic albums released in that year. Simon and Garfunkel split up soon after the release, but even without much touring the LP reportedly sold 1.7 million copies in its first three weeks, unseating the Beatles’ Abbey Road from the top of the charts.

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Popular music has always managed to beguile the poor and the wealthy alike. Jerry Blavat—a half-Jewish, half-Italian son of a bookie—first appeared on Bandstand at the age of 13 in the early 1950s and then went on to distinguish himself as a Philadelphia disc jockey and nightclub owner with ties to stars like Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra, and also, stereotypically, to organized crime families. Pushing 70 now and still spinning oldies, he recounts the highlights in You Only Rock Once: My Life in Music (Running Press, July). Around the same time Blavat was starting out as a teenybopper, Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter, a 40-year-old European aristocrat, was seriously digging jazz: In fact, she left her husband and five young kids so as to become the patron of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, among others. Telling her story in Nica’s Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness (Norton, June), David Kastin suggests that she gravitated to jazz musicians as a way of escaping from the suffocating Rothschild “mishbocho [sic]” and the “aristocratic Jewish banker with deeply held traditional values” who she’d married.

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Ricky Riccardi also focuses on the postwar decades in What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (Pantheon, June), which takes seriously Satchmo’s late career, during which the trumpeter functioned not just as a performer, but also as a symbol of American pop. It was in these years, Riccardi reminds us, that Armstrong recorded some of his most iconic tunes; Pops also reflected, toward the end of his life, on his relations with the Karnofskys, the Jewish New Orleans family for whom he had worked as a boy.

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Among his other achievements—popularizing the term “sexual revolution”; fascinating Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Allen Ginsberg; dying in prison after being busted by the FDA for selling large wooden boxes in which people would sit to gather up their “orgone energy”—the radical sex theorist Wilhelm Reich also managed to inspire at least two pop songs, as Kim Cooper pointed out in a talk, in May, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Patti Smith’s “Birdland” and Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.” For those who want to know more about Reich than can be conveyed in a music video starring Donald Sutherland, Christopher Turner surveys the man’s bizarre but consequential career in Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America (FSG, June).

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Should the prayer that begins Yom Kippur, and is the subject of Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman’s edited collection All These Vows: Kol Nidre (Jewish Lights, August), be considered American popular music? Yes, it absolutely should: As Tablet Magazine Contributing Editor Ari Y. Kelman noted last year, the medieval Aramaic prayer has been covered by the likes of Perry Como and Johnny Mathis. Hoffman’s book includes dozens of short essays by rabbis and artists who discuss the historical and theological aspects of the prayer, as well as its modern resonances.

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Want to make Jewish pop music? The good folks at the Hal Leonard Corporation are here to help with their new Jewish Songs for Accordion (Hal Leonard, June). If you play the accordion—and, honestly, who doesn’t?—you should easily master synagogue favorites “Adom Olam” and “Avinu Malkenu,” and Yiddish classics like “Tum Balalaika” and “Der Rebbe Elimelech.” Practice diligently this summer, and by October you should be ready to jam with Socalled in San Antonio at the International Accordion Festival.

There’s Jeremy Ben-Ami’s A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, July), which offers the philosophy and personal story of the JStreet founder in a format that his most passionate opponents (hi, down there in the comments!) will find conveniently burns when exposed to open flame. And for those, in Israel and in America, who regard JStreet as a villainous, self-hating, anti-Israel cabal (hi, members of Knesset!), there’s even more aggravation to be found in Jack Ross’ Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism (Potomac, June), which comes complete with a blurb from John Mearsheimer and locates a precedent for lefty Jewish anti-Zionists in a mid-century Reform rabbi. And if that’s not enough, there’s also What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters (Columbia, June), which offers the single-state-solution wit and wisdom of Israeli-American filmmaker Udi Aloni, which comes with endorsements and engagements from such celebrities of academic critical theory as Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek (who it turns out probably isn’t friends, or friends-with-benefits, with Lady Gaga). How could such paradox-loving dialecticians not support Aloni, who opposes “all forms of boycott against arts,” but also, at the same time, is among the most vocal supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement?

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It’s not that publishers want to sell books only by infuriating AIPAC devotees; they’re happy to sell to just about any constituency. In No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation (Columbia, June), Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan situate the debate about a Palestinian “right of return” alongside other cases of “people displaced from their homes, regions, and countries as a result of political violence.” In this context, they argue, it becomes clear that “not only is return not the preferred solution for these minorities … but attempted return is unlikely to resolve the problem,” and, so those who really do care about the suffering of displaced minority populations should concentrate on “resolving refugee suffering in the short term rather than hiding behind eschatological promises.”

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Zionism does raise tough questions—even the most iconic genius of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, struggled with them. As Ze’ev Rosenkranz demonstrates in Einstein Before Israel: Zionist Icon or Iconoclast? (Princeton, June), the great physicist was a card-carrying Zionist, but what with his opposition to nationalism, he didn’t always agree with the movement. In one fascinating letter to the editor of a Jaffa Arabic-language newspaper, in 1930, Einstein noted his opposition to “aggressive nationalism,” and that he could “only imagine the future of Palestine in the form of peaceful cooperation between the two peoples residing there.”

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On a visit to Palestine in 1923, Einstein visited a kibbutz in the Galilee, where he found the colonists “extremely congenial”; it might (or might not) have been Degania Alef, the first kibbutz, which is where One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life: A Century of Crises and Reinvention (Transaction, July), starts. The collection, edited by Brandeis professor Shulamit Reinharz and Michal Palgi of the Institute for the Research on the Kibbutz and the Cooperative Idea, offers an overview of the achievements of kibbutzniks and suggests that despite all the challenges to the movement, a renaissance of Israeli collective farming remains possible.

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Kibbutz life in the 1980s gets the arty comic-book treatment in the aptly cooperative Farm 54 (Ponent Mon/Fanfare, May), by the poet Galit Seliktar and her artist brother Gilad. While the excerpt in Words Without Borders focused on the protagonist’s first night in the army, in which she attends a Palestinian house demolition, most of the rest of the book concentrates on tense everyday moments of life on the farm, from afternoon family barbecues to shifts inspecting eggs.

Meanwhile, Dalkey Archive Press continues its Hebrew Literature Series, which is doing its best to make the richness of contemporary Israeli literature more accessible to those Americans who can’t read Hebrew. The two latest titles are Asaf Schurr’s Motti (Dalkey Archive, May) and Gabriela Avigur-Rotem’s Heatwave and Crazy Birds (Dalkey Archive, June). The former is a self-reflectively narrated tale about a loner who takes the blame for a friend’s car accident and winds up in prison, while the latter concerns a woman’s return to the country, to inquire about the death of her father’s friend, after a quarter-century abroad. Like Farm 54, these novels demand that readers attend to them as aesthetically innovative projects, rather than as reflections of current events.

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That’s worth emphasizing, because, as has been frequently pointed out, readers often insist on reading every Israeli novel, no matter how fictional and psychological, as a gussied-up Op-Ed essay about the political situation. Then again, there’s often good reason to view Israeli cultural products as representing national and political concerns. That’s what Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg’s anthology Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion (Texas, July) does, collecting essays from Israeli and American scholars who analyze classic and recent Israeli cinema “as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities”—or, in other words, as a means through which a global audience gains insight into how Israelis understand themselves. Better that, perhaps, than the pro- and anti- propaganda that seems ever more ubiquitous, not only on the news and in the speeches of ideologues, but also on bookstore shelves.

Can’t afford to summer abroad? Nebekh. Does it give you some comfort, or just make you jealous, to know that your landslayt have been very busy internationally, flitting from continent to continent and writing books in the process? If the former, consider reading Michael Levy’s Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating With China’s Other Billion (Holt, July). Dispatched by the Peace Corps to the city of Guiyang, Levy teaches a little English, studies some Chinese, and attempts not to confirm every single stereotype his hosts have about American Jews (for instance: “It is said that in America, the money is in the pockets of the Jews, and the brains are in the heads of the Chinese.”) Don’t take the book’s title literally: In an effort to fit in, he ate “everything from twice-fried pork to ‘red sauce porcupine’ ”—and even a bit of dog meat.

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David William Foster spent a good chunk of last summer in São Paulo, Brazil, where he was leading a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar for his fellow academics called “Brazilian Literature: Contemporary Urban Fiction.” As Foster’s on the Board of Directors of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, it’s not a shock to discover that the participants read, among others, Moacyr Scliar and Clarice Lispector. For those of us who couldn’t be there, Foster has now graciously written a book that covers some similar material, under the title São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production (Florida, June).

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If you’re planning a trip, keep in mind that São Paulo in July is only about as warm as Warsaw. And within another year or two, visitors to the latter city will be able to visit the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, an institution with such a high profile that President Obama himself has already promised to bring his daughters to its opening gala. Of course, Poland needs such a Jewish museum in part because its treatment of its Jews has, at several points in modern history, been lamentable—despite the country’s religiosity. In Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Oxford, June), Brian Porter-Szűcs addresses the way that Polish nationalism and Catholicism have intertwined, sometimes with disastrous consequences: In the mid-1930s, for example, one especially anti-Semitic religious leader, Father Stanisław Trzeciak, riled up his followers with the claim that they were witnessing the “conquest of Poland by the Jews.”

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Practically every European city has mistreated and celebrated its local Jews at some point or other, though each manages to do so in its own special way. That’s one of the messages of Hillary Hope Herzog’s Vienna Is Different: Jewish Writers in Austria From the Fin de Siecle to the Present (Berghahn, July), which surveys dozens of writers, from Herzl and company at the turn of the 20th century to Elfriede Jelinek in the present. Herzog, who teaches German at the University of Kentucky, suggests that Jews have consistently felt “unheimlich heimisch” in the former Hapsburg capital—that is, “eerily at home.”

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Vienna may be different, but “eerily at home” is also a good way to describe how lots of Jews feel in contemporary Berlin, a city defined more than any other by its attempts to move beyond its tragic past while also keeping all its traumas on view. Janet Ward focuses on where the city is now in Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, June), attending both to all the “memorial architecture” and to the city’s “Americanization.”

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Like Herzog’s study of Viennese literature, Susan Daitch’s third novel, Paper Conspiracies (City Lights, August), shuttles from the fin de siècle to the present, only in France. Daitch takes her impetus from the silent movie about Alfred Dreyfus made by the cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès, best known for his fanciful A Trip to the Moon (1902). A film in which one of the first masters of special effects took on a sensational political event makes good sense as a jumping-off point for Daitch’s formally experimental, intertextual fiction. She’s the sort of writer who favors footnotes and who imagines how the Yiddish-speaker who busted Lenny Bruce felt; David Foster Wallace once called her “one of the most intelligent and attentive writers at work in the U.S. today.”

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Dreyfus was one of the first Jewish characters to be portrayed on the silver screen, but there were already plenty of textual precedents in France and on the other side of the Channel, too. As Michael Scrivener demonstrates in Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Palgrave Macmillan, August), Jewish figures cropped up repeatedly, whether as alchemists, criminals, or prophets, in Georgian-period fiction and verse by forgotten figures like Levy Alexander and the King sisters.

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All the best Victorian British writers spent at least a little time representing Jews. John Rignall discusses a key examples in George Eliot, European Novelist (Ashgate, July), arguing that the great novel Daniel Deronda was partly the result of its author’s thinking about “European culture and the Jewish diaspora.” It has been already been argued elsewhere that if she hadn’t run off with a married man for a trip to Germany in July of 1854, she might never have transformed herself from a translator and reviewer named Marian Evans into the novelist George Eliot. So, if you’re still on the fence about that last-minute summer vacation, think of her: Maybe all you need to become the world-famous author you’ve always wanted to be is an adulterous jaunt to Europe?

Last week was an unusually good week for anyone with anything to say about Jews and sex. In particular, various observers objected to Rep. Anthony Weiner’s invocation of the cliché that Jewish women don’t give oral sex. But here’s a new question for a new week: Is it equally offensive when a Jewish woman invokes that same stereotype? Please see the rather creepy first chapter of Lisa Baron’s exuberant tell-all memoir Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All (Citadel, June), in which the former spokeswoman for Ralph Reed introduces herself by explaining that during the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, she was busy “in a Greenville hotel room giving Ari Fleischer a blow job,” and then goes on to note that, “yes, some Jewish girls do give blowjobs.” And discuss.

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If you want a more reliable source on the sexual proclivities of Jewish women than Weiner (or Baron), you’re in luck. Edited by Erica Jong, the unrivaled doyenne of sexually frank Jewesses, Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex (HarperCollins, June) features contributions from a fascinating group of Jewish women including Elisa Albert, Anne Roiphe, Julie Klam, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Jennifer Weiner, Daphne Merkin, Ariel Levy, Eve Ensler, Rebecca Walker, and Molly Jong-Fast. Any single one of them, I suspect, would know exactly what to do with Weiner and his witty repartee if she got her hands on him.

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Surprisingly, Jong notes that she was disabused of her assumption “that pudeur was obsolete” when “at least half a dozen contributors to [her] book would not say yes until their partners agreed.” In other words, many writers still hesitate to write frankly about sex, even in this age of seemingly universal shamelessness. A similar point is illustrated by Love Shrinks: A Memoir of a Marriage Counselor’s Divorce (Soho, May), in which Sharyn Wolf, a Jewish therapist and author of How to Stay Lovers for Life, admits that “in the first few drafts of writing this book, I left our sex life out, putting myself through hoops to do so.” Only later did she deem it relevant to the story of her divorce that “during the eight official years of my marriage, my husband and I had sex three times.”

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Maybe the absence of sex is now what surprises us? In Haley Tanner’s novel Vaclav & Lena (Dial, May), a Soviet woman determines to get her family to the United States, despite the “limit to the number of Russian Jews America would take”; soon enough, she’s there, in Brighton Beach, and she’s sure her son “is every afternoon after school having sex or even just doing naked things,” while a co-worker informs her that the “kids these days are all having sex.” But the girl for whom Vaclav falls, Lena, isn’t one of those kids: While “girls on television and in movies and books seem always to know if they are ready to have sex for the first time. … Lena does not know.” Meaning that’s she’s not ready. At least not yet.

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In Tanner’s novel, things do work out, but if you prefer romances strained and longings unfulfilled, you have other options. Evelyn Toynton’s The Oriental Wife (Other, July), her second novel, follows a German Jewish teenager as she escapes Hitler’s Europe, pursues various beaux, and then, in America, suffers an unexpected medical tragedy. Talia Carner’s Jerusalem Maiden (HarperCollins, May) opens in 1911 Jerusalem with a young Orthodox girl fretting, Asher Lev-like, that to pursue her artistic talent would be a sin: “What if I wanted to live in Paris and paint people and animals?” she wonders, to her frum brother’s horror.

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Wanting what you can’t have is the quintessence of romance, at least of a certain kind. Marketers in Hollywood have known that for a surprisingly long time, as Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (Rutgers, July) makes clear; as early as a century ago, audiences were already described as “craving” and “begging” for photographs of performers whose real personalities and actual lives were impossible to access. The collection, edited by Jennifer Bean, includes dense, detailed essays on the careers of early stars including Lillian Gish and Charlie Chaplin, and Gaylan Studlar’s essay suggests that while some critics have attributed “the decline in [Theda] Bara’s stardom to pure and simple antisemitism”—many fans weren’t thrilled when the iconic vamp and femme fatale turned out to be Jewish—Bara’s initial appeal may have depended on “an image of racialized feminity, the sexually seductive Jewess associated with the East.”

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That image is one of many that have been enacted, appropriated, and transformed over the years by modern Jewish dancers. Edited by dancer and choreographer Judith Brin Inger, Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance (Wayne State, June) includes almost 200 photographs, and it treats performances ranging from “The Jewish Dancing Girl” of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago to Tamar Rogoff’s 1994 memorial dance in Belarus.

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Modern ideas about Jews’ and women’s sexuality can be complex and strange, but some of the images that circulated in antiquity were downright bizarre. William Loader demonstrates this in The Pseudepigrapha on Sexuality (Eerdmans, March), the third installation in his vast five-volume project “exploring attitudes toward sexuality in Judaism and Christianity during the Greco-Roman era.” In The Testament of Solomon, a pseudepigraphical text believed to have been composed sometime in the first four centuries of the common era, the notoriously polygamous Jewish monarch encounters a group of demons. One of them, named Onoskelis, is “a female demon of mixed form, a human woman with the legs of an ass,” who gleefully explains, “Sometimes I strangle men; sometimes I pervert them from their true natures.” Just imagine how much more trouble Weiner might have gotten himself into if she were still around.

The Bintel Brief, the iconic advice column of the Yiddish Forverts, has been well preserved. You can listen to letters from the column read by Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, or download Isaac Metzger’s collection of samples onto your Kindle, or enjoy excellent pastiches of the form in E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) and Johanna Kaplan’s O My America! (1980). It’s relatively easy to recall, then, how Jewish immigrants to the United States in the early years of the 20th century sounded when they poured their hearts out to the editor of their beloved newspaper. What Gur Alroey offers in his new book, Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters From Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century (Wayne State, June) are 66 examples of the personal letters written by such immigrants before they set out on their journeys, expressing all the hopes and worries of people whose lives were about to be flipped upside down.

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Letters from this period can be shockingly intimate, and banal, too. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933 (Yale, May) offers hundreds of missives exchanged by the famed American painter and her husband, the German-Jewish photographer, in the first decades of their relationship. The letters skip charmingly from everyday trivialities to art and politics: In one fairly representative example, from December 1933, O’Keeffe tells Stieglitz that she’s now putting a raw egg in her orange juice every morning, and that she “talked way into the night” with the avant garde poet Jean Toomer about the “the race problem,” inspired by Waldo Frank’s article, “Why Should the Jews Survive?” from a recent New Republic, which Stieglitz had sent her.

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Among other sources, Carrie Pitzulo’s Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (Chicago, May) examines another journalistic trove of American letters, at least as reflective of its historical moment as the Bintel Brief was of its own: the Playboy Forum. Through the letters from readers they printed and responded to, Pitzulo argues, the magazine’s editors “articulated a progressive view of sexual politics,” which included “a distinct tolerance for, if not outright embrace of homosexuality.” Pitzulo acknowledges Nat Lehrman as having edited this section of the magazine “for much of the sixties,” but, unlike your friends at Tablet, she does not mention that Lehrman, Playboy’s sex editor, was a Brooklyn mensch.

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Even more revealing than letters are private diaries, which can seem to offer a window into a writer’s mind. Alfred Kazin’s Journals (Yale, June), edited by Richard M. Cook, serves up the great literary critic in vivid detail and in all his human complexity. At the top of a page in July 1933, when he was an 18-year-old sophomore at City College, Kazin scribbled “Alfred loves Nancy; Alfred loves Sex: Nancy!” and then, below that: “The essence of fascism is not so much the capitalist as it is the nationalist ideal.” The journals dramatize Kazin’s astonishing energy, which he saw as a requirement of his vocation: As he says, apropos an essay by his contemporary Milton Hindus, “the Jewish intellectual has to perform so many functions at once.”

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A certain type of intellectual proclaims in public what another might be content to scribble in a diary. An infamous example took place on the Dick Cavett Show on January 25, 1980, when Mary McCarthy quipped, of Lillian Hellman, that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Hellman—a Jewish playwright and McCarthy-era blacklistee, notorious for fudging her personal details—wasn’t laughing; she sued McCarthy for slander. The case, which played out political schisms of 1930s leftists, serves as a jumping-off point for Alan Ackerman’s discussions of language, libel, privacy, and autobiography in Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale, May).

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Jewish intellectuals, like Kazin and Hellman, have a tendency to cluster in cities, but out in the American hinterlands Jews take on all sorts of other roles. In the Midwest, they’ve been chefs who incorporate local flavors into traditional classics, with results like cornmeal-crusted rye, sour grape ketchup, Syrian spinach souffle, and Eli’s Cheesecake; Ellen Steinberg and Jack Prost cover the history and recipes in From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways (Illinois, June). In Deadwood: “Cattlemen and bankers, watchmakers and innkeepers, purveyors of cigars and whiskey, and suppliers of hardware, boots, and bread,” according to Ann Haber Stanton’s Jewish Pioneers of the Black Hills Gold Rush (Arcadia, April), further evidence that David Milch got it right on HBO. In Belleville, Virginia? Black base-ballers. Yes, seriously: Rebecca Alpert’s Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford, May) tells the tale of the Belleville Grays, “the only Jewish team in the history of black baseball,” and details the role of Jewish owners and journalists both in Harlem Globetrotters-style “Baseball Comedy” and in the integration of America’s pastime. The good news is that according to Uzi Rebhun, a Jewish demographer at the Hebrew University, and his new book The Wandering Jew in America (Academic Studies, June), American Jews were still moving from state to state late in the 20th century. This suggests that there may continue to be new stories of Jews in the American wilderness, innovating further in the fields of sport, mining paraphernalia, and cholesterol delivery.

Consider three: Austin Ratner, Julie Orringer, and Sara Houghteling, all of whom have recently won  awards for emerging Jewish authors. Ratner’s The Jump Artist, which will receive the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature tonight, draws from letters, local newspaper accounts, and medical reports from a 1928 trial in Innsbruck, Austria. Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge won the Edward Lewis Wallant award and was a finalist for the Rohr prize; it recreates the Munkaszolgálat newsletters produced by inmates of the Hungarian forced labor brigades in the 1940s. Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition won the Wallant and Hadassah’s Harold U. Ribalow Prize and serves up details from Rose Valland’s Le front de l’art, published in Paris in 1961.

None of these sources are available in English. The authors, or research assistants, read them in the original. So, if one wants to know about Philippe Halsman’s trial, or the comic stylings of Hungarian forced laborers, or an insider’s view of the Nazis’ looting of the Louvre, the most widely accessible resources in English are these novels, notwithstanding the fact that they’re works of fiction.

Jewish novelists have always drawn from history, whether it’s Isaac Bashevis Singer imagining the 17th century or Howard Fast’s vision of the Maccabees. Typically, though, they have availed themselves of published sources to construct their historical accounts, and they have tended to downplay the research itself, eschewing endnotes and other back matter. In a sense, Orringer’s novel—a dramatization of her grandfather’s life in the 1930s and 1940s—couldn’t be more conventional as historical fiction; but what’s unusual is the time she devoted to examining “artifacts and documents” at research institutes in D.C., Paris, and Budapest, like the National Hungarian Jewish Archives. What does it mean that this latest group of prize-winning novelists insists on doing historical research themselves, committing to more translation of foreign language texts and more digging through the archives than some of our popular historians do, and that they let their readers know about it?

In a recent essay, the three judges of the Wallant award survey the books they have considered in recent years and remark upon this phenomenon, declaring that “at no time before have Jewish writers in America turned so uniformly to history.” They suggest that this vogue for the “researched novel”—the sort of fiction written by Ratner, Orringer, and Houghteling—might be attributed to the impact of W. G. Sebald’s generically hybrid books and to a growing fascination with the construction and transmission of historical narratives among a generation of Jews with ever more attenuated connections to the events of the Holocaust.

More pessimistically, this archival work could be understood as part of a broader turn, by writers including Orringer, Nathan Englander, and Michael Chabon, from telling contemporary American stories to miring themselves in history. A cynic would say that this development reflects the feeling among young American Jews that there is nothing poignant about their lives. As William Deresiewicz phrased this in a review of Chabon and Englander in The Nation, “The most visible of the current generation of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoiding their own experience because their own experience just seems too boring. What is there to say about it? Better to write about a time or place where there was more at stake.”

Both of these arguments have merits, but the specifically archival character of these most recent prize-winners suggests another vector of influence: the positioning of creative writers within the university and on academic payrolls. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, the book of the moment among scholars of contemporary American literature, points out how powerfully the situation of writers in America has changed in recent decades thanks to the explosive proliferation of MFA programs in creative writing. McGurl moves beyond potted debates as to whether working toward an MFA is an enabling aspect of a budding literary career or a homogenizing waste of money. (That’s one of those impossible questions that has as many answers as there are students and alumni of MFA programs.) Instead, he simply remarks upon how massive creative writing has become; with over 300 degree-granting programs and more than 25,000 members of the Associated Writing Programs (the organization for faculty members in the field of creative writing), creative writing in the academy, which pays full-time salaries and benefits to hundreds of novelists and poets, is “the largest system of literary patronage for living writers the world has ever seen.” Having made that point, McGurl then explores what effects this development has produced in the fiction written by the authors who operate within that system’s sphere of influence.

There can be no debate as to whether Ratner, Orringer, and Houghteling are products of McGurl’s program era. In fact, they’re products of a couple of the same individual institutions. Ratner received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, Houghteling got her MFA there, and Orringer served there as a visiting professor. Ratner and Orringer both received MFAs from Iowa, while Orringer and Houghteling have also done time at Cornell, Stanford, and Harvard.

Of course, attending a specific school, or an MFA program in general, does not dictate a novelist’s methods or subjects. And it should be noted, as McGurl does, that one of the most consistent and typical products of the MFA system has been the standard collection of contemporary, semi-autobiographical short stories, like Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater, that requires very little research into anything but one’s own navel. Still, as McGurl suggests, it cannot be entirely coincidental when some contemporary creative writers begin to resemble the literary scholars with whom they share their departments. And it seems plausible to suggest that movements in literary scholarship like New Historicism and history of the book, both of which emphasize archival research and have exerted pervasive influence over the study of American literature in English departments in the past few decades, might have helped to nudge a few creative writers toward the archive.

What concrete form could this institutional influence take? Well, cash. Michigan’s MFA students apply for research grants that allow them to travel abroad or consult archives. Why wouldn’t a student like Houghteling want to write fiction set in, say, France, if a fellowship were forthcoming that would fly her to Paris gratis and cover her croissants? Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic, another prize-winner—it’s tonight’s $25,000 runner-up for the Rohr Prize—mashes up historical fiction and magical realism and includes lengthy passages translated from Esperanto, as well as some snippets in untransliterated Hebrew and Yiddish. Among his other supporters, Skibell thanks “the University Research Committee of Emory University,” where he serves as associate professor of Creative Writing/English. Again, the availability of research grants does not force novelists to translate foreign languages or to compile bibliographies of over a hundred sources in three languages (as scholars of American literature now tend to do), but obviously the possibility of financial support provides a substantial incentive for undertaking such projects.

It might be objected that Ratner and Houghteling aren’t currently academics; even Orringer only teaches as an adjunct these days. But it’s not just academicians who are affected by the institutionalization of creative writing, nor, for that matter, just recently “emerging writers.” Philip Roth, perhaps the least-emerging novelist in the universe, retired from teaching Comp Lit at the University of Pennsylvania almost two decades ago. Yet his most recent novels lean more heavily on research, or at least cite sources more insistently, than he has ever before in his career: his most recent novel, Nemesis, acknowledges 12 specific books from which he has “drawn information,” and The Plot Against America has a list of sources (for its postscript, granted) almost two pages long.

Whether or not a contemporary writer is formally employed by a creative writing program, McGurl insists, she cannot entirely escape what another critic has dubbed the “culture of the school.” Obviously not all young Jewish novelists have been rushing to visit manuscript collections—prizewinners like Ratner, Orringer, Houghteling, and Skibell are by definition exceptional, to some degree, in their literary practices—but doing so has begun to seem normal. The academy asserts its influence over fiction subtly but unmistakably: We see it in the lengthening of novels’ acknowledgments, the proliferation of bibliographies for fiction, and the citations of archival and multilingual research.

The archival turn exemplified by these recent novelists may have less to do with Sebald’s influence or with the blandness of contemporary Jewish life in the United States, then, and more with the status of literature in our culture. A literary novel is much more likely to be a credential for tenure these days than a popular entertainment, and some of our novelists—whether formally employed by universities or just having been educated by them—increasingly resemble our academic scholars. Whether or not this is salutary, and whether or not we like it, the archival turn reflects how our authors get paid, and if this current crop of emerging Jewish novelists is any indication, some get paid to teach us Jewish history.

It doesn’t take a brilliant marketer to realize that The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (Yale, June) should have appeared, oh, say, by early April. But that’s just not how beleaguered academic presses—even beleaguered academic presses as trade savvy as Yale—do their thing. And, really, is it such a problem? The Birds’ Head Haggadah and its contemporaries have already waited seven centuries for the analysis that Marc Michael Epstein provides here; it shouldn’t be that big a deal to ask us to wait a few months more.

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As it turns out, this should be an unusually busy summer for fans of medieval times. Along with Epstein on the oldest haggadot, they’ll have a collection of essays edited by Gad Freudenthal on Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Cambridge, June) to keep them busy. Aside from deserving a prize for no-nonsense book cover design (just the word מדע, Hebrew for “science,” plus the book’s title), the collection includes essays on topics ranging from “Astronomy among medieval Jews” to “ Astrology among medieval Jews.” Plus: “Latin scholastic influences on late-medieval Hebrew physics.”

They may have been scientifically literate, but medieval Jews weren’t always sensible: Witness the fact that unlike Christianity and Islam, medieval Judaism had no female mystics. Sharon Faye Koren’s Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Brandeis, June) argues that this strange dearth resulted from traditional Jewish understandings of menstruation as a ritual impurity, which Jewish men felt was incompatible with higher spirituality—despite women in the Bible and even in the Talmud having proved themselves perfectly capable of religious insight and leadership.

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Speaking of the Talmud: according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Talya Fishman, it is those medieval Jews that we can thank, or blame, for shaping the traditional, Talmud-centered Jewish culture that thrives today from Jerusalem to Teaneck. In Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Penn, May), Fishman sets out to explain “the disconnect between the contents of the Talmud and the roles that it came to play in medieval Jewish culture (and beyond)” by taking stock of what she calls the “textualization of northern European Jewish culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries”: in other words, Jews “came to ascribe greater value to the authority of the inscribed word than it did to oral testimony” and transitioned “from the valorization of memory to the valorization of written records.”

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Like the the “distinction between written matters … and oral matters” with which Fishman begins her study, so much Jewish culture has its roots in the period that has come to be called “late antiquity,” stretching from the late 3rd century to the mid-7th. Alexei Sivertsev’s Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, June), for one, notes that the Roman visions of empire circulating in that period informed the ways Jews imagined their own messianic redemption: if they needed models for how the moshiakh would look and act, Jews could look to the way that the Romans puffed up their emperor. Meanwhile, Ishay Rosen-Zvi attends to late antique Jewish psychology in Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (Penn, June). When the rabbis of the period referred to the evil inclination, the yetzer hara, did they mean sexual desire specifically, or evil in a general sense? Rosen-Zvi argues the latter, and suggests that the rabbis modified ancient beliefs about demons to fit increasingly sophisticated ideas about human minds: Think of the devil sitting on a cartoon character’s shoulder, and the concept of mind that that represents.

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Whether it’s medieval, late antique, or just really, really, old, the Jewish past tends to matter to us only because it continues to resonate in the present. One noteworthy current attempt to argue that an old artifact of Jewish culture matters, very much, right now, is Stan Tenen’s The Alphabet That Changed the World: How Genesis Preserves a Science of Consciousness in Geometry and Gesture (North Atlantic, June). Tenen expounds a dizzying theory about Hebrew as “a natural universal language” through a lot of three-dimensional diagrams that hew assiduously to a 1990s clip art aesthetic, and loopy references to the Zohar (in one of his videos, Tenen says that the most recent translator of the Zohar, Daniel Matt, “has not a clue as to … the deep meaning” of what he’s translating). One emeritus professor of Judaic Studies suggests that Tenen’s theories “could equal the importance of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and perhaps even surpass it.” Samples of Tenen’s work can be found, in abundance, at Tenen’s Meru Foundation site, and though only scholars of Jewish mysticism can say whether Tenen’s legit, one hopes that he’s a conceptual artist lampooning new agey Kabbalists, in which case he’s hilarious.

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A less bewildering demonstration that ancient and medieval cultures can still matter: Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Indiana, July), edited by Berkeley’s Emily Benichou Gottreich and Minnesota’s Daniel J. Schroeter, offers studies of the Jewish communities of North Africa ranging in their setting from the ancient world to the postcolonial. Farid Benramdane’s contribution focuses on Western Algerian place names that derive from the Torah, while Jamaâ Baïda covers “The Emigration of Moroccan Jews, 1948-1956.” The most promising feature of the book, perhaps, is that alongside American and Israeli academics, scholars from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have contributed examinations of the roles of Jews in their national and cultural histories. Is it Pollyanna-ish to hope that such scholarship might help to promote interfaith understanding as the Maghreb redefines itself in the wake of the Arab Spring?

Don’t get excited: The title of Alvin Rosenfeld’s The End of the Holocaust (Indiana, April) isn’t meant to be taken literally. He recognizes that, if anything, the production of representations of and memorials to the Holocaust is accelerating. It’s just that, in his view, “the image of the Holocaust is continually being transfigured, and the several stages of its transfiguration, which one can trace throughout popular culture may contribute to a fictional subversion of the historical sense rather than a firm consolidation of accurate, verifiable knowledge.” In other words, Rosenfeld isn’t enthused that today’s teenagers are rather likely to have learned their World War II history from Quentin Tarantino. Yet it seems worth asking whether the Holocaust is different, in this sense, from any other historical event; has, say, the Spanish Civil War been exempt from such “transfiguration”?

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Still, it’s undeniably true, that authors—Rosenfeld himself included—cannot seem to stop writing about the Holocaust, transfiguring it, adapting it to the particular medium or genre of their choosing. And, yes, this can be creepy. Lydia and Heather Munn offer How Huge the Night (Kregel, April), a Holocaust novel for Christian teens, in which Jews are saved by a Christian community, in France, who see the rejection of Nazism as fulfilling their faith: “Let us gather around Jesus Christ,” a pastor says to his flock, “and let us draw our thoughts and our words and our actions from his gospel, and only from his gospel. … Our duty as Christians is to resist the violence imposed on our consciousness, resist it by the weapons of the Spirit.” (Too bad this isn’t intended as a reference to Will Eisner.)

The Berlin Boxing Club (HarperTeen, May), Robert Sharenow’s second novel, also targets a particular subgroup of young adults; in this case, pugilism enthusiasts. In the book, an assimilated German Jewish teen trains in the sweet science with Max Schmeling and has to decide how much he can trust his mentor as the Nazis loom.

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For the same reason that young adult authors occasionally write young adult Holocaust novels, photographers take some Holocaust pictures. Yuri Dojc’s Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia (Indiana, April) contains the haunting photographs he took of decayed Jewish texts rotting in “an abandoned Jewish school in eastern Slovakia, where time had stood still since the day in 1942 when all those attending it were taken away to the camps.” Treating books as “survivors” and “witnesses,” the images are another unsettling example of what the literary scholar Amy Hungerford has characterized as “the Holocaust of texts.”

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Rosenfeld’s book carries blurbs from Elie Wiesel and Cynthia Ozick; coincidentally, or perhaps not, so does Geoffrey Hartman’s The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies (Penn, April). The book includes essays that, by the author’s admission, are “neither erudite nor highly specialized,” but that demonstrate what happens when a literary critic, a Wordsworth specialist and adept of Derridian theory, takes seriously the Jewish textual tradition. Hartman sounds a little like Rosenfeld here when he cautions that “to make the Holocaust a source of Jewish identity, of a new Jewish particularism, is as dangerous as ritually over-assimilating it to other catastrophes”—but note that Hartman has excluded from this book his “writings on the subject of the Holocaust,” reserving those “for a further publication.”

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One of Rosenfeld’s main concerns is that “it is not primarily from the work of historians that most people gain whatever knowledge they may acquire of the Third Reich and the Nazi crimes against the Jews.” Yet, of course, historians continue to pump out studies of the Holocaust that are available to anyone who wants them. To wit: Peter Hoffman, who has published widely on German resistance, offers Carl Goerdeler and the Jewish Question, 1933-1942 (Cambridge, April), which concentrates on the Leipzig mayor who opposed the persecution of Germany’s Jews and aided the resistance until being hanged for treason in 1945. Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s Untold Story (Cambridge, June), by Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey, draws upon the correspondence of a large family, the Kaufmanns and Steinbergs, members of which spent the war in Germany, America, and Palestine, to describe daily life in all its variety during and after the years of the genocide. Antero Holmila, a Holocaust researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, who has published mostly in Finnish, contributes Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish, and Finnish Press, 1945-50 (Palgrave Macmillan, June), which compares press coverage of the liberation of the concentration camps and the Nuremberg trials in England and Scandinavia.

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Can we even distinguish between the work of historians and novelists? Not always, evidently: To produce the book that’s called The Druggist of Auschwitz: A Documentary Novel (FSG, April), Dieter Schlesak conducted interviews with survivors and perpetrators and combed through transcripts from the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. Translated from German, Schlesak’s book isn’t quite as “unique” as its publisher claims (compare it to Heimrad Bäcker’s “documentary poems,” for one obvious parallel), but it does offer the most thorough study in English of Victor Capesius, the titular half-Jewish Nazi pharmacist, who was personally responsible for many deaths. The book is a reminder that some of the artists who represent the Holocaust do so not to subvert, but rather to embrace, the methods and sources of professional historians.

The Levant: It’s one of those fascinating places that exists less as a concrete geographical entity (the word itself means “rising” in French and originally designated, simply, “east”) than as the imagined territory of folks like Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Born in Cairo in 1917 to an Iraqi father and Tunisian mother, she rose to prominence as a novelist and essayist in English in New York in the 1940s, then settled in Israel, where she felt neither linguistically nor ethnically at home, given that she wrote in English and located her personal history in Iraq and North Africa. With Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford, June), Sasson Somekh and Deborah Starr offer up the first anthology of Shohet Kahanoff’s work in English, most of which has until now been published exclusively, strangely, in Hebrew translation.

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Like Shohet Kahanoff, Philip Mansel treats the Levant as a “mentality.” He focuses on three modern cities—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—distinguished by their “diversity and flexibility” in Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (Yale, May). Are they “Global cities before globalization” or “volcanoes waiting to erupt”? Mansel argues that they were both at once, because cosmopolitanism hasn’t been very good at defending itself, at least not with the sort of military force that nationalism usually has at its disposal: “the very qualities that gave these cities their energy … also threatened their existence. No army, no city.”

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Ali Bader’s journalistic novel The Tobacco Keeper (Bloomsbury Qatar, June) dramatizes Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism and its discontents; published in Arabic in 2008, the book was longlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize and has now been translated to English. In it, a Iraqi Jewish violinist, exiled from his homeland after the establishment of Israel, yearns for his Babylonian home. He keeps sneaking back into the land of his birth, by transforming himself into an Iranian and Syrian, and in each of his incarnations he has another son—the first a Jew, the second a Shiite, the third a Sunni—making for a rather complicated family reunion.

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Nina Rowe describes in The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, April) how, in the medieval period, French and German sculptors represented the competition of the church and the synagogue in stone, representing these institutions as “rival queens who vied for authority over the earth.” The artists who designed façades of cathedrals in places like Reims, Bamberg, and Strasbourg expressed their disrespect for the shul by depicting Synagoga “as blindfolded, holding a broken spear, rejecting the Lamb of God, and being shoved to the ground.”

The old girl had more life in her than these sculptors imagined, though. A few hundred years later, synagogues would begin popping up in North America, and Sharman Kadish’s The Synagogues of Britain and Ireland: An Architectural and Social History (Yale, April) documents Jewish houses of worship in the British Isles, starting with the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue at Bevis Marks, “the first purpose-built synagogue in Britain,” which, having operated continuously since 1701, offers “physical testimony to the stability of Jewish life in Britain.”

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Also alive and well: feminist activism among Orthodox Jews and Muslims in contemporary Israel, Kuwait, and the United States. So argues Jan Feldman in Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism: Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights (Brandeis, May). Feldman acknowledges her personal stake in this argument; her last book, Lubavitchers as Citizens, was an “attempt to square [her] feminism and nonpartisan humanism … with [her] strong attachment to Lubavitch,” and more recently, she has explained how she became “the only professor on campus”—at the University of Vermont, where she teaches political science—“in a sheitel.”

Feldman suggests that Jews and Muslims share the experience of being religious minorities in America; Reza Aslan and Aaron J. Hahn Tapper’s Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities (Palgrave Macmillan, April) echoes this point, exploring parallels and points of divergence. The collection includes essays and statements by such Jewish and Muslim public intellectuals as Judith Plaskow, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, Ingrid Mattson, and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and it will inevitably ruffle some feathers; when Aslan and Tapper speak in Northern California on June 1, they’ll do so under the title “It’s Complicated.”

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One way to cut through some of these complexities and contentions, is with a bit of the funny. Christie Davis argues, though, in Jokes and Targets (Indiana, April), that even humor can be used to explain sociological phenomena. Davis identifies “cases where a pattern of jokes exists in one society or for one group but not for another” and explains why that might be. One example: the jokes about sexless Jewish American Princesses (“What’s the difference between a tidal wave and a JAP? A tidal wave swallows seamen”), which Davis explains as “a product of a tension between two sets of values, in this case loyalty to a particular identity, tradition, and community on the one hand and American individualism on the other.” Sure, that makes sense, but is there anything that can explain Ari Shaffir?

NPR’s On the Media—a brilliant weekly radio show that expertly covers journalism and the arts from the perspective of how they’re produced, circulated, and consumed—is hosted by two Jews, Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, with the sort of are-they-or-aren’t-they names that used to be de rigueur for Jews throughout the news industry and show business, too. Though this is almost certainly just a happy accident, it’s a perfect new media echo of that traditional dynamic in American mass media, in which Jews have frequently been passionate about their work, and so very influential, yet often eager to downplay their Jewishness so as not to encourage those perennial anti-Semitic stereotypes about how a Jewish conspiracy nefariously controls the media. Gladstone, an NPR veteran and adept radio editor as well as host, tries a new medium on for size in The Influencing Machine (Norton, May), a comic book-style exploration of the mediafication of our world, illustrated by Josh Neufeld, in which Gladstone appears as a cartoon guide.

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Graphic novels seem to be the medium of the moment, at least for some cultural professionals who have made their names working in other formats: Add to the list of comics written by novelists Aaron and Ahmed (Vertigo, May), the first such outing by Jay Cantor, the MacArthur-prize winning author of Great Neck; in it, a therapist finds himself obsessed with a Gitmo detainee and with suicide bombers generally after his fiancée perishes in the 9/11 attacks. It seems like it’s about time, actually, that Cantor got around to writing a comic book: Almost a quarter-century has passed since his post-modern novelization of George Herriman’s genius comic strip Krazy Kat, which transforms Ignatz Mouse into a Jewish Freudian.

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Everybody calls Asian-Americans “the new Jews”; isn’t it about time, then, we started calling American Jews “the old Asians”? In Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (Temple, April), Cathy Schlund-Vials considers the literary interactions and parallels of the two groups, attending to resonances in the works of Mary Antin and Gish Jen, Sui Sin Far and Abraham Cahan, Robert Olen Butler—and even Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

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Andrea Myers is really a new Jew: She used to be a Lutheran, and now she’s a lesbian rabbi. What happened? Well, in a word: Brandeis. Myers tells her story of conversion and ordination in The Choosing: A Rabbi’s Journey From Silent Nights to High Holy Days (Rutgers, April), including the time her Sicilian Catholic bubbe, intending well, baked her some pork hamantaschen.

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Ellie Taylor, the teen protagonist of Amy Fellner Dominy’s first novel for young adults, OyMG (Walker, May), also has to make a choice between Lutheranism and Judaism. The donor who funds the scholarship Ellie desires, to a Christian summer camp for debating nerds like herself, seems like she might prefer a believer in Christ, and Ellie figures she can pass as a non-Jew, at least for the summer, to avoid conflict. Even at Jewish summer camp, though, Ellie might have run into some problems. Notwithstanding the title of Jacqueline Jules’ picture book Picnic at Camp Shalom (Lerner, March, ages 5-9), its story begins with an incident that causes tension: One camper gets offended when she feels that her best friend is making fun of her name. Don’t worry, though: Both books end, as so much fiction for kids does, quite happily.

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New York’s Bureau of Jewish Education, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association basketball team, and the Menorah Journal: Each of these three American Jewish institutions was founded in the 1910s and persisted for decades, but none of them is as well known or appreciated today as it should be. Jonathan Krasner chronicles the history and wide influence of the first, which was founded by the pedagogical pioneer Samson Benderly in 1910, in The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education (Brandeis, May). The second, a pro team that dominated the American Basketball League in the 1930s and toured with the Harlem Globetrotters after World War II, featured almost exclusively Jewish players with names like Inky Lautman, Cy Kaselman, and Shikey Gotthoffer; it receives the recognition it deserves in Douglas Stark’s The SPHAS: The Life and Times of Basketball’s Greatest Jewish Team (Temple, May). The third, a crucial and lively modern Jewish magazine, counted among its contributors not just all the great American Jewish minds of its time, but also leading non-Jewish thinkers including Randolph Bourne and John Dewey; as Daniel Greene demonstrates in The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Indiana, April), the group of writers and academics around the journal articulated the notion of “cultural pluralism” as a way of convincing “a skeptical nation of the potential for synthesis between American Anglo culture and Jewish culture.”

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Not everyone in Cold War America was enamored with the Menorah group’s notion of pluralism: In 1951, the Christian Century magazine “decried pluralism as a ‘national menace’ promoting ‘instability’ and the subversion of ‘the tradition American way of life”—and Will Herberg, in his influential 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, insisted that “the ethnic champions of ‘cultural pluralism,’ ” Greene’s subjects, had not “gauged aright the dynamics of American life.” Yet, as Kevin Schultz shows in Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford, April), Herberg was a major contributor to the emergence of a religious pluralism in the postwar years, having argued that the three faiths became “the primary context of self-identification and social location” for Americans. Schultz surveys the intellectual and theological developments through which the United States was transformed from what FDR described, in 1942, as “a Protestant country” to a comfortable and inclusive home for all the new Jews and old Jews alike.

Harold Bloom actually does credit his Jewish childhood as having preconditioned his career choice: “My vocation as a teacher was Jewish in its origin,” he remarks in The Anatomy of Influence: Literature As a Way of Life (Yale, May), a meditation on his lifelong ardor for the Western canon. Bloom—a Yale eminence of whom it has been reported that he could “read a thousand pages an hour” as a young man and that he once recited a rather long poem from memory, backwards, while drunk—is not exactly known for having a low opinion of himself—yet he also acknowledges his limits: “How,” he asks, “can Jewish culture be extended by deep reading of The Merchant of Venice or Song of Myself? It cannot, and I must acknowledge that this is not my role.”

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Marjorie Garber and William Deresiewicz are two more Jews, who, like Bloom, taught in Yale’s vaunted English Department—but who, unlike him, did not get tenure there. Garber’s career took her onward to the English department at Harvard, nebekh, and she now publishes on everything from Shakespeare’s plays, to cross-dressing, to the erotics of real estate. Her latest, The Use and Abuse of Literature (Pantheon, March), breezily poses all the axiomatic literary questions that get raised, and never answered, in introductory English courses: What is literature? What’s it good for? And what should we do when yet another falsified Holocaust memoir garners international attention?

Deresiewicz isn’t exactly a fan of Garber, finding in her new book mostly “mildewed commonplaces and shot-springed arguments … half-chewed digressions and butt ends of academic cliché.” This sort of takedown isn’t unprecedented, either; since leaving Yale, Deresiewicz has established himself as a freelance critic more than willing to serve up a hatchet job of an overpraised young writer like Zadie Smith or Nathan Englander. His memoir, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (Penguin, April), makes clear why he’s so unforgiving of contemporary writers: Next to Jane Austen, who doesn’t look like a clumsy hack?

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Some critics and literary scholars vent their spleen—or at least exercise their imaginations—in novels of their own. Alan Cheuse received his PhD in comparative literature for a dissertation on a Cuban “boom” writer, Alejo Carpentier, before beginning to write fiction and to review books for NPR. His most recent novel, Song of Slaves in the Desert: A Novel of Slavery and the Southern Wild (Sourcebooks Landmark, March), makes for a nice Passover conversation starter, as it deals with the slave-holding Jewish owners of a South Carolina plantation in the years before the Civil War. Like Cheuse, Adam Lifshey was trained as a scholar of Spanish and comparative literature; his first novel, As Green As Paradise (Scarith, January), tells a mythical tale of villagers harried by an “inquisitioner” in a new world colony, evoking, obliquely, the history of conversos and crypto-Jews who established communities in Latin America. David Unger’s novel The Price of Escape (Akashic, May) likewise features a European Jew who, escaping persecution, winds up in Latin America. In this case, Samuel Berkow gets out of Hitler’s Europe before the invasion of Poland, only to discover that the natives of Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, have an impressive gift for bamboozling newly arrived refugees. Unger himself immigrated to Florida as a child, and he writes in English, but when he’s not writing novels, he translates some of the most interesting Latin American authors, including Rigoberta Menchú, Nicanor Parra, and Elena Garro.

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Other novelists devote their nonfictional energy not to scholarship or translation but to publishing: Among the best contemporary examples of this phenomenon is E.L. Doctorow, who, before writing The Book of Daniel and Ragtime, was the editor responsible for Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers and for Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, among many other titles. Doctorow’s latest book, All the Time in the World (Random House, March), offers a mix of his best short stories, some previously published, some not, from the 1960s to the present. One of the finest is “A Writer in the Family,” about a Jewish teenager in the Bronx discovering what fiction can and can’t accomplish.

Stuart Ross, meanwhile, has been a fixture in the Canadian small press scene for decades—as a founder of magazines and of book fairs, as a columnist and editor, and as a publisher of chapbooks written by himself and by other authors. Though he is known mostly as a poet, his latest book is a novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew (ECW, April): It begins with the, ahem, inglourious vengeance murder of a neo-Nazi by a woman in Canada who lost relatives in the Holocaust and follows her son’s responses, sometimes through performance art, to other traumas.

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Bill Zimmerman’s response to having lost relatives in the Holocaust was to throw himself into political activism in the United States: He was there in Mississippi, in the march on the Pentagon, at the Democratic convention in Chicago, in Hanoi, at Wounded Knee. He tells his war stories in Troublemaker: A Memoir From the Front Lines of the Sixties (Doubleday, April), relating run-ins with Abbie Hoffman and César Chávez and suggesting the strength and courage necessary for true radicalism. Radicalism didn’t stop in the ’60s, either; Susan Rosenberg’s An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country (Citadel, March) describes the ordeal of the author’s 16 years in maximum-security prisons after she, a daughter of middle-class Upper West Side Jews who was already on the FBI’s most wanted list for her political activities, was caught in 1984 behind the wheel of a U-Haul loaded with 740 pounds of dynamite.

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Garber’s book suggest that literature is all about inspiring questions. By that measure, Gilbert Gottfried’s Rubber Balls and Liquor (St. Martin’s, April) is very literary, as it raises a great number of questions. To wit: What idiot gave Gilbert Gottfried a book deal? Why would they think it would be a good idea to present the textual remarks of a comedian whose single comic asset, his astonishingly annoying voice, is entirely lost on the page? Are there literate Gottfried fans out there? Wouldn’t anyone who can read, and surf the Internet, realize that Gottfried tells the world’s moldiest, corniest jokes? Why does Gottfried’s audience laugh at these stinkers? And, finally, does the desperate embrace of minor celebrities by respectable book editors indicate the final stages of intellectual Armageddon?

Most refreshingly upfront about its goals: Robert Kopman’s 30 Minute Seder: The Haggadah That Blends Brevity With Tradition (30 Minute Seder, 2011). Who needs all that blah blah blah about Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah and Rabbi Tarfon? This haggadah isn’t appropriate, though, if your guests are the types to say, “What? It’s time to eat already? Can’t we please spend more time discussing whether there were 50, 200, or 250 plagues at the Red Sea?”

Least appropriate for a Seder in Lilongwe, Malawi: Yehuda Berg’s The Kabbalah Haggadah: Pesach Decoded (Kabbalah Publishing, 2009) would, it seems, be something of a faux pas over there this year.

Perfect if you find yourself in a Brewster’s Millions situation: For $18,000, the Premier Edition of The Szyk Haggadah gives you Arthur Szyk’s signature embossed in gilt on the cover, plus “22 carat gold tooling” throughout. Guaranteed to match your gold-plated karpas! For the non-insane, there are reasonably priced editions of Szyk’s 1930s anti-fascist allegorical masterpiece, such as The Szyk Haggadah: Freedom Illuminated (Abrams, 2011).

If your guests don’t like all these newfangled Seder elements: Take them back to the 15th century with The Washington Haggadah (Harvard, 2011), which offers a full-color reproduction of a manuscript illuminated in 1478 by a scribe named Joel ben Simeon (and which is named for its contemporary home, at the Library of Congress in D.C.).

The haggadah we’re still waiting for: When, when will Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander deliver that hipster haggadah they’ve promised? It tarries, but according to Amazon.com, it will finally arrive in October 2011: just in time for Thanksgiving! Next year in Park Slope, then?

Likely to disappoint the Shakespearean actors at the table: The intrepid Sue Fishkoff reports that the new edition of the Maxwell House Haggadah—the haggadah of choice of the Obama White House—includes, for the first time since 1934, an updated translation that has removed all those fusty faux-Renaissance linguistic touches we’ve all gotten used to, like “thee” and “thou.” Alas, alack! How art we supposed to worshippeth our Lord in just plain American English?

If you believe that the Holocaust should be invoked at every Jewish public event: A Passover Haggadah (Simon & Schuster, 1993) features Mark Podwal’s drawings and Elie Wiesel’s commentary and poems, which link the ritual to recent historical trauma: “A camp./ An inmate. … It is night,/ The first night of Passover. … The parable of Had Gadya is misleading:/ God will not come/ To slay the slaughterer.”

For big families who don’t understand the idea of economy of scale: If all you want is the traditional, Orthodox text, Artscroll’s Family Haggadah (Artscroll, 1981) is a bargain: only $3.59 a copy, bound in sumptuous-sounding leatherette (or $2.24 with a laminated paper cover). But it seems that somebody’s tam son must be responsible for the price on the slipcovered, leatherette set of eight, which costs $33.29 (that is, $4.16 per copy), as if to punish those who buy in bulk.

Good for fans of chanting: Eliahu Klein’s A Mystical Haggadah: Passover Meditations, Teachings, and Tales (North Atlantic Books, 2008) includes “a mystical meditation” before most of the rituals, drawn from the Zohar or from such gurus as the Rashash. These, along with anecdotes about the Hassidic masters and a dash of playful gematria, help Seder-goers in “achieving cosmic consciousness.”

For those who actually do want to tell the story of the Exodus, over and over, until the break of dawn: A Passover Haggadah: Go Forth and Learn (JPS, 2011) comes equipped with the extensive commentaries of Rabbi David Silber. The founder of the Drisha Institute in New York, Silber knows a thing or two about Jewish textual study and offers enough textual readings to keep you talking until the sun comes up.

Looks sharpest in your NPR tote bag: Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families (HarperCollins, March) allows you to greet Elijah alongside Cokie and Steven Roberts. The book comes to you straight from the D.C. intelligentsia, and brims with optimistic religious pluralism: as its authors told Vox Tablet a couple weeks back, Passover is by far the most Jesus-friendly of the Jewish holidays (blood libels notwithstanding).

For the tikkun olam crowd: Last year’s In Every Generation: The JDC Haggadah (Devora Publishing, 2010) features a forward by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin praising the Joint Distribution Committee for its outreach to threatened Jews all over the world, plus commentaries by Ari Goldman—but it’s the photographs of Seders across the globe, from Yemen to Lithuania, that make an impression.

If you have a favorite Orthodox superstar rabbi: Then he has a haggadah for you, whether it’s Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Haggadah (Contiuum, 2007), or Norman Lamm’s The Royal Table (Orthodox Union, 2010), or The Carlebach Haggadah: Seder Night With Reb Shlomo (Urim, 2001), or Seder Night: An Exalted Evening (Orthodox Union, 2009), which includes “commentary based on the teachings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.”

Closest you’ll get to a Family Circus or Marmaduke haggadah: Richard Codor’s Joyous Haggadah (Loose Line Productions, 2008) features an energetic comic strip retelling of the Exodus—nothing cries out for the Sunday Funnies treatment like the Death of the Firstborn, right?—plus, charmingly, the Four Sons as performed by the Marx Brothers.

Most appropriate for a Seder fueled by psychotropic drugs: Newly available for shipping to the United States, Asher Kalderon’s Haggadah (Urim, 2011) features the artist’s lush, gradient-shaded images, which have all the trippy verve of 1960s rock posters.

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Some authors focus on the present moment and record the perspectives of the people on the ground. In The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem (Routledge, February)—a translation of 2007’s Kikar Hashuk Reka—Hillel Cohen surveys internal Palestinian politics and explains that it’s not just peacenik Israelis whose hopes have been dashed since the Second Intifada, but also those hoping for a part of Jerusalem as capital of a Palestinian state. Michael Riordon speaks to those optimists (or Pollyannas) who continue to agitate and hold out hope for compromise and stability in Our Way to Fight: Israeli and Palestinian Activists for Peace (Chicago Review, May). Jennifer Griffin and Greg Myre, a mom-and-pop pair of journalists who report for Fox News and the New York Times, have collaborated on a book the subtitle of which emphasizes its of-the-moment quality: This Burning Land: Lessons From the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Wiley, March). One fears, though, that all these books, recently researched as they may be, hit the shelves already out of date, given the consequences we’ve already seen developing for Israel, and for the Palestinian population and leadership, of the ongoing revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere.

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One thing not likely to change: Minorities will still have strained relationships to the mainstream in Israel, as they do everywhere else. Amal Jamal—himself a Druze Israeli and, as a professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, one of the most prominent non-Jewish academics in the country—studies the political behavior of Arab Israelis in comparative contexts in Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel: The Politics of Indigeneity (Routledge, March). Joyce Dalsheim treats another minority that also relates fractiously to the secular Jewish majority in Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (Oxford, March). Having done fieldwork among the settlers, Dalsheim offers insights into the political, theological, and social dimensions of life in pre-withdrawal Gaza.

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To many, Israel’s complexities just make it that much more fascinating. Even a piece of cheery, visually exuberant promotion like Aviva Werner’s Experience Modern Israel: Explore, Discover, Connect (Behrman, April, ages 10-12) acknowledges that part of the appeal of Israel is arguing about it: Among other features of the book and the companion digital experience, designed to market the country to the pre-bar mitzvah set, are sections titled “Debate It,” in which students “discuss the separation barrier and other hot topics.” Good times! A better selling point, Werner seems to realize, is the landscape, which photographs beautifully. There’s good precedent for this, according to Boaz Neumann’s newly translated Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Brandeis, May): Neumann takes seriously all the earnest paeans to the land in the diaries and literary works of Zionist pioneers, understanding their passion for territory, both symbolic and concrete, as foundational to the Israeli enterprise.

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Despite the conflicts—or because of them?—books on every aspect of Israeli society proliferate, topic by ever more specific topic. Raz Yosef’s The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Routledge, February) examines the spate of award-winning films produced in Israel over the past decade, emphasizing their framing of painful experiences as personal, rather than national, struggles. Daniel Maman and Zeev Rosenhek, two sociologists, turn their attention to the country’s financial system in The Israeli Central Bank: Political Economy, Global Logics and Local Actors (Routledge, March), tracking the competition between the central bank and the Ministry of Finance. Aaron Pribble, a self-described “redneck Jew-boy” whose minor-league baseball career has included stints on the Toulouse Tigers and Sonoma County Crushers, chronicles a brief, recent interlude in the history of Israeli professional athletics in Pitching in the Promised Land: A Story of the First and Only Season in the Israel Baseball League (Nebraska, April); Pribble witnessed all the glory and awkwardness from the mound, as a southpaw for the Tel Aviv Lightning. Meir Finkel—director of the Israeli Defense Force’s Ground Forces Concept Development and Doctrine Department—offers tips that will come in handy for anyone managing a military force in On Flexibility: Recovery From Technological and Doctrinal Surprise on the Battlefield (Stanford, March); he offers such historical examples of effective military responsiveness as “The German Recovery From the Soviet T-34 Tank Surprise” and “The Israeli Recovery From the Egyptian Sagger Missile Surprise.” And, finally, in Law and the Culture of Israel (Oxford, April), Menachem Mautner identifies the Israeli Supreme Court as the institution through which Israeli secularists, looking to Anglo-American liberalism for their models, resist the religious fundamentalism that asserts itself elsewhere in Israeli political life. By highlighting the particularities of the Israeli courts, army, baseball league, financial industry, and movie business, such books help to fend off the reductive thinking so persistently applied to the country.

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Meanwhile, in his most recently translated book, Amos Oz effaces the particularities, mapping the emotional and mythic dimensions of the conflicts he has witnessed onto an abstracted fable about the disappearance of all the fauna—“even bugs and reptiles, bees-flies-ants-worms-mosquitoes-moths, hadn’t been seen for many a year”—from an isolated village. Titled Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest (Harcourt, March), the book comes recommended for young adults, but it works as an allegory for adults, too: With whom would a tale about how communities and individuals struggle with their collective losses not resonate?

A Jesuit school founded by the Roman Catholic Diocese, Fordham University isn’t the first New York institution that comes to mind as a hotbed of contemporary Jewish theology. But it’s Fordham, and specifically Robert C. Pollock, a professor of philosophy and Jewish-born convert to Catholicism, whom the founder and guiding spirit of Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute, Rabbi David Hartman, credits as having exposed him to the rich intellectual tradition of American religious pluralism. That background comes through in all Hartman’s work; in The God Who Hates Lies: Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition (Jewish Lights, March), Hartman tackles a question that bedevils people of all faiths, approaching it from an Orthodox Jewish perspective that’s sensitive to the wide variety of beliefs of contemporary Jews: What should you do when the dictates of your religious practice conflict with what you know, in your heart, to be right?

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Hartman isn’t the first to ask this question. Struggles with problems of conscience against tradition, or reason against faith, have been at the center of Jewish theological wrangling and hand-wringing at least since the Enlightenment. Indeed, in Michah Gottlieb’s study, Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought (Oxford, March), an influential Jewish Enlightenment thinker comes off sounding a little like Hartman; Gottlieb’s Mendelssohn, influenced both by the religious icon Maimonides and by the atheistic radical Baruch Spinoza, “defends Jewish religious concepts sincerely, but in doing so gives them a humanistic valence appropriate to life in an enlightened society.”

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Books like Hartman’s and Gottlieb’s contribute to the sense that, as Gottlieb perceptively notes, “the wars between religion and reason … have been renewed” in the 21st century, especially on our bookshelves: “a dizzying number of new books have already appeared on the topic with more on the way and no end in sight.” Well, add one more to that pile: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia, February) offers academic celebrities like Jürgen Habermas, Cornel West, and Charles Taylor, riffing on religion and secularism. There’s also a chapter by Judith Butler in which she presents her take on Hannah Arendt’s religious influences and asserts that “to openly and publicly criticize [Israeli state violence] is in some ways an obligatory ethical demand from within Jewish frameworks, both religious and nonreligious.” As if any serious Jewish critics of Israel need Butler’s prodding to do their thing.

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A more informative discussion of relations between Jewish religion and the public sphere, at least in the United States, can be found in Marc Lee Raphael’s The Synagogue in America: A Short History (NYU, March). Spanning the history of American Jewry from the colonial period to the present, Raphael notes that until the 20th century, synagogues went unchallenged as the primary social spaces for America’s Jews, not to mention the structures whose location and architectural design made Judaism visible in the American landscape.

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If only what Gottlieb calls “the wars between religion and reason” were always metaphorical battles taking place in books of learned theology. Hans Kippenberg’s Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization (Stanford, March) concerns itself with literal religious wars, and particularly with the sort of faithful brutality that has become more and more common since the Jonestown disaster in 1978, in the United States and Middle East. Contradicting some scholars who understand violent tendencies to be an inseparable component of monotheistic Judaism, Kippenberg argues that the “link between monotheism and violence” is “contingent: it is neither necessary nor impossible” that monotheists will perpetrate reprehensible acts of destruction.

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“Nuclear zero”—the reduction of the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons to zilch, a stated goal of Obama’s White House—would seem like the answer to many people’s prayers; at the very least, if that goal were attained, Ron Rosenbaum could relax a little. But as far as Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Judith Reppy, the co-editors of Getting to Zero: The Path to Nuclear Disarmament (Stanford, March), and their contributors are concerned, nuclear zero would raise more questions than it answers, especially in countries like Iran and India. In one chapter, Avner Cohen, whose 2010 The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain With the Bomb, surveyed Israel’s “strategy of amimut [opacity]” regarding its nuclear arsenal, “wonders what will become of Israel’s policy of opacity in a disarming world or in a Middle East that includes a nuclear Iran.”

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Whatever nuclear crises the future holds, they will probably be even more complicated than the classic Cold War mess chronicled by David A. Nichols in Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis: Suez and the Brink of War (S&S, March), in which Ike had to respond to the Soviet invasion of Hungary and to the British, French, and Israeli actions in the Suez—all while recovering from surgery and a heart attack. Ike may not have supported Israel as much as some Americans and members of Congress would have liked, but at least he didn’t give Henry Byroade, American ambassador to Egypt, what he demanded: a presidential “fire-side chat” that would “break the back of Zionism as a political force.”

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Despite having created the most powerful weapons of all time, and the means with which humanity might someday eradicate itself, physicists can be good for a laugh, too. Walter Lewin, an MIT researcher whose lectures have become popular online, is the sort of serious scientist happy to act zany if that helps to make his subject appealing and comprehensible. A Dutch-born Jew, Lewin has been a fixture of MIT’s annual Latke vs. Hamantaschen debate; one year, he argued that Heisenberg based his uncertainty principle on the Hannukah miracle. In For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time (S&S, May)—an old-media companion piece for his web videos—he shares his infectious enthusiasm for physics and explains how he wound up as a scientific celebrity.

Next time you’re sitting under an incandescent light bulb, think about this: In 1911, Thomas Edison asked, “Do you want to know my definition of a successful invention? It is something that is so practical that a Polish Jew will buy it.” The Quotable Edison (University Press of Florida, March), edited by Michele Wehrwein Albion, includes that tidbit along with a few other of the inventor’s musings on the chosen people. The Wiz of Menlo Park had a fascinating explanation for what he described as “the almost supernatural business instinct of the Jew”: “Women have, from the beginning, taken part in Jewish councils; Jewish women have shared, always, in the pursuits of Jewish men; especially have they been permitted to play their part in business management. The result is that the Jewish child receives commercial acumen not only from the father’s but from the mother’s side.”

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It’s not clear where exactly Edison was getting his information, but he may have had a point in the limited sense that at least since the time of Glückel of Hameln, some Jewish women have had opportunities to be breadwinners for their families. Does this undermine the claim Rabbi Elyse Goldstein makes, in her essay “The Pink Tallit,” that until recently “the patriarchy has defined us”—Jewish women, that is—“as child bearers, child rearers, caregivers”? Not much. The new paperback edition of a collection of essays Goldstein edited in 2008—titled New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future (Jewish Lights, March), its contributors include such religious leaders as Tirzah Firestone, Jill Jacobs, and Danya Ruttenberg—reminds us just how far Jewish women have come. As Goldstein phrases it in her introduction, “Growing up in the 1960s, the notion of a woman rabbi, a woman Israeli Supreme Court judge, or an Orthodox synagogue where women read the Torah from their side of the mechitzah … were impossible dreams, even ridiculous scenarios.”

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Something else that would’ve been unimaginable, most places, before the women’s movement: a woman not taking her husband’s name when they married. Now keeping one’s name has become socially acceptable, but the practice of taking one’s husband’s name still hasn’t become the sort of comic anachronism giddily exploited by Mad Men. Israeli sociologists Orly Benjamin and Michal Rom set out to understand what factors contribute to Israeli women’s decisions about taking and keeping names today, in view of the particular gender dynamics of their nation, in Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel: Women’s Marital Names (Palgrave, May).

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In some areas, Jewish men and women have achieved something like equality: When Leah Koenig remarks that her focus in The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook: Daily Meals for the Contemporary Jewish Kitchen (Universe, March) is not on “bubbe food,” part of what she seems to mean—given the gender neutral language with which she refers to her readers—is that zaydes, and potential zaydes of the future, should also get in on the action. If that sounds a little strange for a cookbook from the Women’s Zionist Organization, clearly you haven’t heard enough about the Hadassah Associates.

Not that Jewish men in the kitchen is an entirely new phenomenon. Apparently, aside from serving as executive producer of St. Elsewhere and directing an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, Bruce Paltrow also taught his daughter to cook, or at least that’s the premise of My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness (Grand Central, April), authored by the Academy-Award-winning, Huey-Lewis-duet-partnering, three-time-SNL-hosting beauty that Rabbi Tsvi Paltrowitch, the Gaon of Nitzy-Novgorod, could not possibly have imagined would be his great-great-great-granddaughter.

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If Gwyneth seems almost miraculously well-adjusted despite a childhood among Hollywood types, think how much more difficult things must have been for Molly Jong-Fast, born half a decade after her mother contributed the term “zipless fuck,” indelibly, to the international vernacular. There were benefits, too, to being raised to think of herself as “first and foremost a Jewish neurotic,” as Jong-Fast recalled in her 2005 memoir: “Rich kids in Manhattan who aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer are considered dyslexic: they are sent to tutors who do their homework and (best-case scenario) give them candy.” In The Social Climber’s Handbook (Villard, April), Jong-Fast tells the bouncy fictional tale of Daisy Greenbaum, an Upper East Side socialite and occasional killer of Wall Street execs.

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Like Daisy, Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) reacted intensely to the excesses of capitalism; unlike her, Luxemberg did so as a Marxist theorist. Born in Zamosc, she made her mark in German Communist circles, and the Jewishness of her family mattered less to her than their support for her revolutionary activities; her father bailed her out of jail in 1906. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, February), edited by Annelies Laschitza, Georg Adler, and Peter Hudis, includes everything from Luxemberg’s youthful mash notes to her theoretical arguments, as well as her uncanny prediction of “pogroms against Jews in Germany.”

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Doubt that science fiction remains something of a boys’ club? Google “sci-fi women” and see what you get (“Hottest Sci-Fi Girls,” “The Top 13 Hottest Sci-Fi Women Ever,” and so on, ad nauseam). On the other hand, it would be unthinkable these days to publish a collection like People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy (Prime, March)—which includes Michael Chabon’s 2005 Nextbook lecture “Golems I Have Known” and a story by Neil Gaiman—without contributions from women, such as Jane Yolen and Tamar Yellin, too. Especially since one of the book’s editors is Rachel Swirsky, an Iowa Writer’s Workshop student, WisCon chronicler, and maintainer of a “blog of a feminist writer.” Let’s hope that soon her site will be the first hit for those Googling “Jewish sci-fi women.”

It’s a challenge that our best post-Soviet writers all face sooner or later: Where to turn for material after you’ve already done the celebrated semi-autobiographical debut? Gary Shteyngart inventively wrote about the post-Soviet present and the American future; David Bezmozgis focuses instead on the still-Soviet past in The Free World (FSG, April), or at least on the first moments of a family’s escape from it. The novel covers a few tense months of 1978: The Krasnanskys have emerged from behind the Iron Curtain but don’t know their final destination. In Italy, in the meantime, they encounter luxuries unknown in their native Latvia, such as hard-core porn.

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Italy’s Jewish population has persisted since antiquity, and through better and worse moments: Daša Drndić’s novel Trieste (Quercus, April) describes one of the latter, in the 1940s, when the Nazis occupied northern Italy and established concentration camps in the border city where, some decades earlier, James Joyce had lived the expat life and hung around with Italo Svevo. Drndić’s novel centers on a Catholicized Jewish mother hoping to be reunited, decades after the war, with the son she had with an S.S. officer, and it presents their story through a collage of Sebaldian documentation, including testimonies, photographs, and maps.

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Back up a few more centuries, and recall for a moment how awkward life could be for Jews in Catholic Italy, where the idea of deicide has never been too far from anyone’s mind. As one of the characters in Sarah Bower’s historical romance Sins of the House of Borgia (Sourcebooks Landmark, March) points out: “We’re never safe, you know, among the Christians. They believe we gave up their messiah for crucifixion. Having done that, we’re no longer necessary to their salvation so they feel at liberty to take revenge.” Bower dramatizes the strangeness of Jews’ positions in Renaissance Italy by focusing on a baptized Jewish woman who finds herself privy to the dirty laundry of the Italian noble families and of the papal court, too.

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Moshe Idel provides a very different perspective on Italy’s early modern Jews in Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510: A Survey (Yale, April), which concentrates on Abraham Abulafia, Menahem Recanati, and Yohanan Alemanno. Idel notes that these thinkers not only developed distinct and fascinating approaches to esoteric Jewish spirituality, but also influenced the development of Christian kabbalah (which should not be confused with our contemporary kabbalah aggressively marketed to gullible souls, whether Christian or not).

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For better or worse, and though many of them have histories as long and as tangled as those of their counterparts in Italy, we hear about Jewish communities elsewhere in Southern Europe most often in terms of their suffering at the hands of the Nazis. For example, Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu’s academic collection Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, March) reminds us of the Romanian backgrounds of a wide range of Holocaust survivors who have become major literary figures in other nations and other languages, including Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld, and Elie Wiesel, along with the more familiarly Romanian Norman Manea.

Or take the Balkans. Emily Greble’s history, Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Cornell, February), notes that the Independent State of Croatia was “one of the most notoriously brutal Nazi satellite states” and an unusual one in that it instituted Catholicism and Islam as national religions. “In Sarajevo,” Greble notes, “everything from the process of confiscating property to the deportations of Jews had a distinctly local quality.” A Sarajevo-born survivor herself, Esther Gitman accentuates the positive in When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945 (Paragon, March), examining why some individuals under Croatian rule went out of their way to protect Jews. One reason was the high level of intermarriage: Even the wife of the country’s fascist leader, Ante Pavelić, was half-Jewish, Gitman notes. Still, as Greble acknowledges, “for every Sarajevan helping a Jew, there was another eagerly awaiting to claim the property of a Jewish neighbor dragged off in the night.”

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Like Gitman, Ralph Baer escaped the Nazis as a child; his German parents moved him to America just before Kristallnacht. A pioneering engineer, Baer went on to create the very first home video game console, the first proto-Duck Hunt light gun, and—if that’s not enough—the electronic game Simon, too. Referred to now as “The Father of Video Games,” Baer is one of the pioneers chronicled in Harold Goldberg’s All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (Three Rivers, April), alongside the creators of Pac-Man, Myst, and Bejeweled. Baer’s story suggests another potential vector of Italian-Jewish relations: If not for the innovations of this refugee from Nazi Germany, would the world’s most famous and most beloved Italians now be a pair of pixelated, mushroom-bopping plumbers?

What better way to celebrate Purim—the holiday, which begins on the evening of  March 19, that commemorates a narrowly avoided genocide of Jews by Persians a few centuries before the common era—than by cooking up a feast of Persian food? Actually, this seems like a ridiculously counter-intuitive idea: Does anybody eat Wienerschnitzel on Yom Hashoah or horiatiki on Hanukkah? But counter-intuitivity is very much the guiding spirit of Purim celebration. So Reyna Simnegar’s Persian Food From the Non-Persian Bride: And Other Kosher Sephardic Recipes You Will Love offers up various tidbits of Purim lore, like the suggestion that the name of Haman’s wife, Zeresh, might be “derived from the Persian name for … zereshk,” which are “tiny dried berries” that “give a tart flavor to many Persian dishes.” A Venezuelan UCLA alumna who learned Persian cuisine from her Iranian Jewish mother-in-law, Simnegar offers only kosher recipes, despite her Catholic childhood: Having discovered her family’s converso roots as a child, she converted to Orthodoxy as an adult and now takes pride in cooking “marrano dishes.” “There is nothing better,” she has remarked, “than seeing my children with tzitzit and kippot, indulging in marzipan!”

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The Jews’ salvation in the Purim story comes to pass because Ahasuerus, the Persian monarch calling the shots, has a weakness for the ladies—which allows Esther to influence royal goings-on. In that sense, if no other, Ahasuerus resembles the biblical Solomon, whose sexual partners reputedly included princesses of various Middle Eastern nations plus the Queen of Sheba. Steven Weitzman doesn’t focus on the king’s libido in Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom (Yale, March), but rather on his “lust for knowledge,” yet he does devote a chapter to the question of how “the wisest man in the world, the pious builder of the Temple, could have sinned” by marrying Canaanite women and then building shrines to their idols.

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Ahasuerus is said to have ruled “from Hodu to Kush,” that is, from India to Ethiopia. With a foothold in Africa, his massive empire might have wielded influence even over Africa’s west coast, where, a couple thousand years later—in the early 17th century, in Senegal, to be precise—Jewish traders dealt in swords and other goods. Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta recover the unfamiliar history of these Jewish communities in The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, March), noting, among other fascinating aspects of their history, the reintegration of some Afro-Portuguese Jews into Amsterdam’s Sephardic community.

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For a couple of centuries, Sephardic merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic, establishing trade routes and setting up outposts in Curaçao and New Amsterdam, among many other places. By the 19th century, though, Jews making the high-seas trip from Europe to the New World, or vice versa, were more likely Germans or Eastern Europeans, whose experiences resembled those of their non-Jewish contemporaries more than the Sephardic entrepreneurial travelers of previous generations. Co-edited by Nils Roemer, a historian trained by Yosef Yerushalmi who has written on modern Jewish tourism, a new academic collection titled Crossing the Atlantic: Travel and Travel Writing in Modern Times (TAMU, March), devotes some attention to these transatlantic voyages taken by modern Ashkenazi Jews.

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In the late 19th and 20th centuries, when U.S. immigration wasn’t an option, some European Jews chose Latin America, while others—those who couldn’t bear to part with Poland’s climate, one assumes—headed for Canada. A century later, the Canadian Jewish community isn’t doing badly: For some reason, the national broadcasting company pays one Jew to yammer endlessly to his friends on the radio for half an hour each week. But how are they really doing up there? Jack Jedwab breaks down the numbers in Canadian Jews in the 21st Century: Identity and Demography (Academic Studies, March), attending particularly to the demographic outliers who self-identify on government surveys as either ethnically Jewish or religiously Jewish, but not both.

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Small Jewish communities, like Canada’s, have always fretted about a shande far di goyim—a scandal that attracts the attention of the wider, non-Jewish community—and the 2008 playground murder in the Bukharan Jewish community in Queens that lit up the local and national press absolutely qualifies. (Except that Bukharans don’t typically speak Yiddish, so they presumably call the shameful tragedy something else, in Bukhori.) Janet Malcolm covered the trial for The New Yorker, in which the amazingly named Mazoltuv Borukhova, a doctor, stood accused of paying for the assassination of her orthodontist husband, and Malcolm expands her account in Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (Yale, March).

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If ancient scandals thrill you more than contemporary ones, you can always return to the old story of Queen Esther, sleeping her way to the top. Rabbi David Fohrman worries, though, that “if you first learned about Esther and Haman when you were six years old, you may well still see them the same way now as you did back then,” instead of seeing it as “a richer, deeper narrative … a story whose meaning touches the dawn of Jewish history, but is equally relevant and fresh in our own age and time.” In The Queen You Thought You Knew (OU, March), Fohrman explores the contradictions of the text, offering an extended, chatty series of close readings that ponder the characters’ counter-intuitive behavior.

Meanwhile, the second edition of Vanessa Ochs’ Sarah Laughed: Modern Lessons From the Wisdom and Stories of Biblical Women (JPS, March), originally published in 2004, offers another way of making Esther relevant in the present: “Considering trying out Esther’s beauty ritual” as a complement to make-up, Ochs suggests: “Think about the people whom you plan to encounter in the course of the day. Imagine them and recall what it is about them that you admire. … Then repeat Esther’s chant: ‘I look into your eyes. You think I am beautiful, but it is because you are beautiful to me. In this circle, we become precious to each other.’ ” It just might work: Esther’s wiles and beauty single-handedly saved her people from annihilation, so boosting your self-esteem doesn’t seem like too much to ask of her.

Big cities aren’t necessarily more conducive to Jews’ comfort and success than smaller ones; it took until last week for Chicago to elect a Jewish mayor, but Albuquerque did so 136 years ago. In fact, Henry Jaffa was the very first person elected to that office, and his successor was Jewish, too. Naomi Sandweiss covers the stories of these businessmen-cum-politicians and other tidbits of local history, while also including 200 period photographs in Jewish Albuquerque: 1860-1960 (Arcadia, March). The publisher’s series includes volumes on Shreveport, Chattanooga, Harrisburg, Nashville, Maine, West Virginia, and many more American cities and states where one cannot always expect to assemble a minyan at short notice.

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Six hundred miles left of Albuquerque, Las Vegas is more obviously Jewish: Everyone who’s seen Casino knows that guys like Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal have long been machers in the gaming industry. Less widely hailed are such local heroes as Reno tailor Jacob Davis, who dreamed up the idea of reinforcing pants pockets with rivets, thereby co-creating the American blue jean. Telling the stories of gambling titans and immigrant innovators alike, and now available in paperback, John Marschall’s 2008 book, Jews in Nevada: A History (Nevada, March) serves up stories of peddlers, gunslingers, and synagogue founders, too. It’s a veritable Comstock Lode of Sagebrush State Jewry.

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One imagines that Marschall’s book already occupies a prominent place on the shelf in the personal library of Rep. Shelley Berkley: Who can we expect to be prouder of Nevada’s Jewish history than the Temple Beth Shalom member elected in 1999 to represent Las Vegas in Congress? While she is one of only two Jews Nevada has ever sent to Congress, Berkley has no reason to be lonely in Washington. Over the centuries, Jews have been elected to Congress from a total of 37 states, including many where good rugelach and cholent are not always easy to find, such as Alaska, Iowa, and Oklahoma; Louisiana boasts no fewer than five “minyanaires,” the term Kurt Stone uses in The Jews of Capital Hill: A Compendium of Jewish Congressional Members (Scarecrow, January). Stone progresses chronologically, beginning with David Levy Yulee, who served from 1841 to 1851 and again from 1855 to 1861 as a Whig-Democrat from Florida, and concluding with another Floridian Democrat, Ted Deutch.

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Experiences in the American hinterlands have influenced the lives of even inveterate New Yorkers; the artist and educator Temima Gezari, for example, born in Pinsk in 1905 and raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, roadtripped to New Mexico with a couple of friends in 1931 to attend the Taos School of Art. Upon her return to New York—and after some tutorials from Diego Rivera—she painted the murals for Mordecai Kaplan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Gezari’s pedagogical interventions are the subject of one of the essays in a 2010 collection edited by the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Carol Ingall, newly available in a more affordable paperback, titled The Women Who Reconstructed American Jewish Education, 1910-1965 (Brandeis, March). Other influential pedagogues and pioneers profiled here include Hadassah’s Jessie Sampter, ardent Hebraist Anna G. Sherman, and Sadie Rose Weilerstein, author of the beloved K’tonton books.

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More recent developments in Jewish education in America, especially at the post-secondary level, are the impetus for Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (Penn, March). As the academic study of Judaism and Jewish experience has mushroomed since the 1960s, its practitioners have embraced a variety of disciplinary approaches that do not always play nicely together, despite the never-ending hoopla about interdisciplinarity. As David Ruderman acknowledges in his preface to the volume, “It is one thing to encourage a dialogue between historians and anthropologists; it is quite another to reach a consensus and a common language about the subject of these inquiries.” Ranging widely through time and across the globe, the essays here, by such stalwarts as Riv-Ellen Prell and Harvey E. Goldberg, attempt to demonstrate how fruitful it can be for scholars to cross the artificial divides.

Another index of changes in advanced Jewish education can be found in Andrew Bush’s Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction (Rutgers, March), which surveys the history and the structuring tensions of the discipline and inaugurates a new book series called Key Words in Jewish Studies. “The fundamental question for studying Jews,” Bush writes, “is not how to maintain a relationship to the Jewish God, to the Jewish Book, or to the Jewish people, but what kind of object does one study when studying Jews?” To answer this question, Bush explores such terms as “science, nation, race, and religion” as they have been deployed and critiqued, from the founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums to the present.

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A cultural critic by vocation, Leo Braudy manages to bring together history and a little bit of anthropology in his pithy study The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon (Yale, February). Those letters up in the hills, as one might expect, have as complex a story as anything produced by America’s image-makers. Erected in 1923, spelling out “Hollywoodland” as advertising for a real estate development, the sign deteriorated during the ensuing decades; at times, Brady suggests, “the decaying sign above the city mirrored the attitude toward Hollywood’s own history,” just as its current iconic status reflects the strength of the American celebrity machine. Braudy can’t tell this story without a few references to Hollywood’s Jews: In addition to the expected studio bosses and Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, he also cites In Hollywood With Potash and Perlmutter (1924), Montague Glass’ comic romp about New York garment industry veterans who hope to make a fortune in California’s movie business.

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One of Hollywood’s eccentricities is a tendency to repeat itself, always releasing comedies about police dogs or animated features about insects in oddly matched pairs. Apparently this phenomenon has spread to the world of Yiddish-to-English translation: Shirley Kumove’s new translation of Yehoshue Perle’s rediscovered coming-of-age novel Yidn fun a gants yor (1935), titled Ordinary Jews (SUNY, March), follows only a few years behind the version published by Meier Deshell and Margaret Birstein as Everyday Jews. Perle’s book surely deserves attention, but given how many worthwhile Yiddish books have yet to be translated at all, as scholars in that field regularly note, the question is why scant publishing resources should be devoted to two versions of the same text.

The short stories in Erika Dreifus’ debut collection, Quiet Americans (Last Light, January), focus on families and individuals working through traumas of the Holocaust, decades afterward. Unlike many writers, Dreifus recognizes the bitter irony that, if successful, she will profit by making art out of the experiences of the victims, survivors, and perpetrators of Nazi genocide: She will donate some proceeds from the book to a charity that supports indigent Holocaust survivors. Dreifus also admirably engages in deeper exploration of Jewish identity than some chroniclers of Jewish victimization, for whom persecution is all that makes Jews interesting. As she notes in one of the recent posts from her “blog tour”—Dreifus, who holds a Harvard doctorate in modern history, is also an indefatigable social networker and e-newsletterer—her fiction fits the model of Jewish identity proposed by the veteran educator Avraham Infeld, in that the stories invoke, at least briefly, all five of the components of Infeld’s “five-legged table” concept of Jewish identity: memory, family, covenant, Hebrew, and Israel.

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Core to Infeld’s pedagogic shtick is that a table doesn’t need five legs to stand, just three; and “if we all choose at least three, we won’t be uniform, but we’ll always have something that we share.” It’s a sweet idea, but finding values and principles that all Jews share is, cute metaphors aside, a challenge. The 2011 issue of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, edited by Eli Lederhendler and titled Ethnicity and Beyond: Theories and Dilemmas of Jewish Group Demarcation (Oxford, February), tackles this problem, especially as it relates to the slippery concept of “ethnicity.” The volume’s contributors—leading analysts of American Jewry like Jonathan Sarna, Riv-Ellen Prell, Sarah Bunin Benor, and Steven M. Cohen, as well as a few scholars with international perspectives—debate the usefulness of thinking about Jews as ethnics.

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Alan Montefiore approaches the vexed questions of Jewish identity with the explanatory tools of his academic discipline, analytic philosophy, in A Philosophical Retrospective: Facts, Values, and Jewish Identity (Columbia, February). Do the “facts” of our backgrounds determine our “values”? Should they? Montefiore—whose descent from one of England’s great Jewish dynasties one would expect to wield some sort of influence upon the course of his life—argues that those who differ on these questions do so because of their fundamentally dissimilar ideas about the relationship of the individual to the social collective.

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British intellectuals like Montefiore have been fretting and fussing about the complexities of modern Jewish identity, especially as they play out among the poor Jews on the continent, since at least the mid-19th century. That’s where Sam Johnson’s study, Pogroms, Peasants, Jews: Britain and Eastern Europe’s ‘Jewish Question’, 1867-1925 (Palgrave, January) begins. Johnson chronicles the responses of Brits to all sorts of Jewish tsuris, from the Romanian anti-Semitism of the 1860s and 1870s to the infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903, also offering a wide-ranging survey of “Ostjuden in the British mindset.”

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For the Piaseczna Rebbe, Kalonymus Lamish Shapira, Jewish identity per se wasn’t all that complex; his concern was the growing unwillingness of young Jews to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and to their God. In The Students’ Obligation and Three Discourses (Feldheim, January), newly published in a handsome facing-page translation, the Rebbe—who maintained his faith even while confined to the Warsaw Ghetto, and who was murdered in a Nazi work camp in November 1943—outlines his educational philosophy (“The most important thing is to teach them that they themselves are their own educators”) and calls out directly to lazy, egotistic, and falsely humble teenagers: “Jewish youth! … Do you really want to cause Klal Yisrael to continue to waste away in galus … without leaders?”

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More and more, scholars of Christian history and culture are acknowledging that they cannot make much sense of their subject matter without close attention to Jews and Jewishness. For example, the 13 essays gathered in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties From the Catacombs to Colonialism (Penn, February), edited by David Nirenberg and Herbert Kessler, all concur that in various “Christian cultures” throughout the centuries “art defined and legitimated itself by rearticulating and representing its relationship to ‘Judaism’ ”; examples range from 4th-century reliefs to Delacroix’s A Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1839). And even a Catholic theologian like Brant Pitre admits the utility of consulting Jewish sources. Though he notes in his Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets to the Last Supper (Doubleday, February) that he treats “the four Gospels as reliable historical witnesses to the words and deeds of Jesus … following the traditional Christian view of their historical reliability, as well as the official Catholic teaching promulgated in 1965 at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council,” he also insists that if they hope “to understand what Jesus was doing and saying in his original context,” Christians must carefully study the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus’ writings, and particularly the Talmud and Midrash.

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Henry Miller couldn’t have been thinking of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer when he asked, in Tropic of Cancer, “Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?” But Miller nailed Fischer, nonetheless: After his dazzling victory over Boris Spassky in 1972, Fischer, whose mother was Jewish (and who, as Gary Kasparov points out, recent rumors suggest might have had a Jewish father, too), retreated from the spotlight and became fascinated by anti-Semitic tracts including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Ben Klassen’s Nature’s Eternal Religion. His animus bloomed as the years passed: He wrote in 1999, “Unfortunately we’re not strong enough just to wipe out all the Jews at this time. So what I believe we should do is engage in vigilante random killing of Jews. … They deserve to have their heads cracked open.” In telling the twisted prodigy’s whole story in Endgame: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Bobby Fischer (Crown, February), Frank Brady sketches various attempts to explain Fischer’s turn to bigotry, even quoting David Mamet’s Nextbook Press volume on self-hatred. If nothing else, Fischer is one more reminder for us of the wide gap between brilliance and goodness.

How did the rabbis of the Talmud smell? No, this isn’t the set-up for a terrible joke (the punchline of which would inevitably, lamentably, have to be, “With their noses”). Posed sincerely, this question drives Deborah Green’s The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature (PSU, March). Tracking references to perfume and incense in the Torah, Talmud, and midrash, Green recovers what she can of the olfactory culture of late antiquity to place the rabbis’ senses of smell into their historical context—and to understand how their embodied, sensual lives influenced their theological understandings.

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Judaism has grappled with a different facet of embodiment—gender—since the first chapters of Genesis, where the text introduces the distinction between “male and female” early on and then quickly complicates matters with a reference to “woman,” called such “because she was taken out of man.” Examining such verses in Gender Issues in Ancient and Reformation Translations of Genesis 1-4 (Oxford, March), Helen Kraus focuses on their translations from Hebrew to Greek, Latin, German, English, and Dutch throughout the centuries. She suggests that these versions transform what began as androcentrism—that is, a focus on men—into a source-text frequently cited as justification for the discriminatory mistreatment of women by the faithful.

Kraus’ take on the first chapters of the Torah accords well with Rabbi Isaac Sassoon’s argument that, while one cannot gainsay ancient and rabbinic misogyny, the Torah and Talmud offer plenty of alternative perspectives, too, some of them less oppressive in their patriarchy. Indeed, some passages, at least in Sassoon’s reading, can even support women’s claims of equality, as he explains in The Status of Women in Jewish Tradition (Cambridge, February). As Sassoon decorously phrases it, “the Talmud is innocent of any assaying of life that fluctuates according to gender. Thus the chasm dividing man and woman in the rabbis’ topography, though gaping, did not reach all the way down to soul and quick.”

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One specific way in which ancient Israelites treated men’s and women’s bodies more or less equally is that both could be bought and sold as slaves. This wasn’t a unique facet of Judaism, of course, as contributors to Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge’s The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 1: The Ancient Mediterranean (Cambridge, February) make clear. Ancient Jewish attitudes to slavery—which are surveyed in the volume by the University of London’s Catherine Hezser, author of 2005’s Jewish Slavery in Antiquity—differed from those of other ancient peoples mostly in terms of their specific details: For example, “Hebrew legal thinkers limited the length of debt-slavery a Hebrew could endure to six years, while Hammurapi had limited debt-slavery service to three years.”

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Jewish sports stars demonstrate that, pace Woody Allen and Seth Rogen, there is nothing inherently weak, fumbling, or slovenly about Jews’ bodies. Take Lip Pike, son of a Dutch Jewish haberdasher in Brooklyn, and a crucial American baseball pioneer. The first professional player in the country—the first, that is, to admit publicly that he was paid to play—he was so fast on his feet that he once beat a horse in a footrace. He also led the National League in home runs in its second season, in 1877, with a whopping four dingers. Richard Michelson tells Pike’s life story in a picture book, Lipman Pike: America’s First Home Run King (Sleeping Bear, March, ages 4-8), lavishly illustrated by Zachary Pullen. “In America,” the book has Lip’s father remark, justifying the time his sons devote to sports, “even the smartest young men chase balls like silly boys. We want our children to fit in with their neighbors, not to live like foreigners in their birthplace.”

Pike was hardly the last Jewish slugger to lead his league in home runs; in 1938, 1940, and 1946, the American League home-run champ was one of Pike’s coreligionists. Which is not to say that Hank Greenberg was very religious. Mark Kurlansky argues in Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want To Be One (Yale, March) that while Hammerin’ Hank sat out a key game on Yom Kippur in 1934—a gesture that would be repeated by Sandy Koufax decades later—he identified more as a secularist than as a synagogue attendee.

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Bouncing around the newly formed professional leagues, Pike spent one season, 1871, playing for the Troy Haymakers; Richard Selzer, a retired Yale surgeon and author of reflective books on the medical practice (think Atul Gawande, but decades earlier) grew up in that Hudson River city and memorialized it in his 1992 memoir Down From Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age. Selzer’s latest book, Diary (Yale, March) offers his brief, disconnected reminiscences from 1997 to 2008: many lunches at New Haven’s Educated Burgher, with or without pre-med undergrads or faculty colleagues. Though his parents were Jewish and he occasionally refers to the Torah (“Aside from Noah, the only sympathetic character in the Old Testament is Isaiah,” he proclaims), Selzer professes a wistful atheism: “If only there were a God,” he muses, “to thank for this lovely life of literary seclusion.”

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When it comes to God—the one in which Selzer cannot, to his regret, believe—the question of embodiment gets rather tricky. On the one hand, it is widely understood as contrary to Jewish theology, or as just plain silly, to think of God as “the old man with a beard,” as Rabbi David Lyon puts it in God of Me: Imagining God Throughout Your Lifetime (Jewish Lights, February): “Such a flawed God image,” Lyon argues, “impairs any hope that God’s presence in our life could inspire us, guide us, and strengthen us”; he offers up alternatives. Meanwhile French literature scholar Didier Maleuvre’s The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing (California, February), surveying human obsessions with the infinite across the millennia, credits Jews with the abstraction of God into “a voice in the whirlwind … an idea or ideal, a law, the silence of contemplation,” during the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert. On the other hand, though, newly available in paperback and having won awards from the American Academy of Religion and the Association for Jewish Studies, Benjamin Sommer’s The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, January) reminds us that “the God of the Hebrew Bible has a body” and, as he explains elsewhere, that this “God with a body is … a God with whom we can have a relationship, because a being with a body is a being like us.” If so, it seems like there’s an inevitable question to ask: How does God smell?

It’s a typical Black Sea story: In 1885, a girl named Eleonora Cohen, a native of the largest Romanian port city, stows away with her father, a carpet salesman, on his journey to the capital of the Ottoman empire. Once there, she winds up in the court of the sultan, who can appreciate the counsel of a precocious child genius like Eleonora, even if she is Jewish. Such is the premise, at least, of the debut historical novel The Oracle of Stamboul (Harper, February), by Michael David Lukas, who has sojourned in Istanbul himself through means more typical of our own time: a Fulbright fellowship.

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The city in which Eleonora’s finds herself, like most imperial capitals and most of the major cities linked by the Black Sea, had its fair share of Jewish residents. The political and cultural lives of such Turkish Jews are the subjects of two books recently reprinted by a New Jersey press, founded in 2001 and “run for scholars by scholars,” which focuses on the ancient and modern Middle East. In a study originally published in 1996—The Jewish Community of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century (Gorgias, February)—Ilan Karmi argues that reforms in 19th-cenury Ottoman policy made life easier for the Jewish community of the capital, while Gad Nassi, a dedicated advocate of the Istanbul Jewish community, includes articles by a range of scholars in his 2001 collection Jewish Journalism and Printing Houses in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Gorgias, February).

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If she had sailed north instead of south, Eleonora could have just as easily landed herself in Odessa, another Black Sea port where Jews made history alongside Greeks, Turks, and Romanians. Charles King memorializes this unique city in Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (Norton, February), having consulted archival sources in several languages. King highlights famed artists such as Isaac Babel and Sergei Eisenstein, who burnished the myth of the city in their fiction and film, and he ends his book with the cultural legacy of the city’s Jews as it can be glimpsed in the Little Odessa of Brighton Beach. “They send us their Jews from Odessa,” King quotes Isaac Stern on the cultural exchange programs between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., “and we send them our Jews from Odessa.”

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The transfer of Jewish intellectuals from Nazi-controlled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s to the United States was, understandably, more one-sided: America got some of the world’s great scientists and artists, while Germany got handed its ass by the U.S. military. Richard Bodek and Simon Lewis’ collection of essays on the period’s cultural refugees, The Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism (South Carolina, January), treats not only the most familiar exiles of the era—Mann, Adorno, Bartók—but also the novelist Herman Broch, philosopher Walter Kaufmann, and artist Max Reinhardt.

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As deplatziert as German intellectuals may have felt in postwar America, Yoram Kaniuk was even more out of place there: Born in Tel Aviv in 1930, he was a wounded veteran of the 1948 War of Independence when he arrived in New York, a penniless Middle Eastern teenager eager to live the life of an artist. Fictionalizing his time in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper (Dalkey Archive, February) recounts run-ins with jazz greats Miles Davis and Billie Holiday and Hollywood stars James Dean and Marlon Brando, meanwhile demonstrating that young Kaniuk had at least one quality in common with these world-famous Americans: He could screw around just as self-destructively.

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The young Kaniuk’s hope that through his interest in art and culture, he, as a Jew, could nonetheless find common ground with other artists, especially those from similar backgrounds of displacement, parallels the dynamics that the literary scholar George Bornstein says were at work in Jewish, Irish, and African-American culture in the century before Kaniuk arrived in New York. In The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 1945 (Harvard, February), Bornstein argues that these groups saw one another as inspiration, embracing “models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism”; he points, as evidence, to Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, to Abie’s Irish Rose and The Jazz Singer.

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Like the texts Bornstein discusses, contemporary pop culture traverses ethnic and national boundaries—but it often loses its cultural specificity in the process. Dubbed into Italian, for example, The Nanny is no longer a sit-com about an annoying Jewish girl from Flushing, Queens, but rather an annoying Italian-American who hails from the Ciociaria region. In the Italian Simpsons, meanwhile, Groundskeeper Willie becomes a Sardinian rather than a Scot. Chiara Francesca Ferrari studies this phenomenon in Since When Is Fran Drescher Jewish?: Dubbing Stereotypes in The Nanny, The Simpsons, and The Sopranos (Texas, January), demonstrating both the global reach of American pop culture, and the ease with which the Jewish markers of that culture can be excised or ignored, when that’s convenient.

As Jeffrey Goldberg and Hussein Ibish’s op-ed, “Good News From the Middle East (Really),” argued last week, now’s no time to indulge in despair about Israel and Palestine. Conveniently for Jewish readers, then, two new books aim to give all of us a clearer understanding of who the Palestinians are by telling the stories of Sami al Jundi and Izzeldin Abuelaish, respectively, in The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey From Prisoner to Peacemaker (Basic, February) and I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity (Walker, January). Both men have suffered at the hands of Israelis: Al Jundi, who was a young aspiring terrorist, spent 10 years in Israeli jails, while Abuelaish, a fertility doctor who has worked in Israeli hospitals, lost three daughters instantly when an Israeli shell hit his house in Gaza in early 2009. Yet rather than revel in the infinite bitterness and rancor exuded by so many small minds on both sides, both of these men express hopes for a peaceful compromise that will alleviate the suffering of Palestinians and offer security to Israelis.

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Those less interested in personal histories—that is, policy wonks who don’t mind shelling out $140 for 392 pages of academic prose—can brush up on how and why Israel keeps track of Palestinians in Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (Routledge, December). Co-edited by David Lyons, who directs the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario—an apt position, one might say, from which to watch over this burgeoning field—the book includes contributions from Israeli, Palestinian, and Canadian scholars on topics ranging from “colour-coded paperwork for Palestinian population control” to the “behavioral profiling in Israeli aviation security.”

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But, hey, if you want despair, you can certainly find plenty reason for it in books that rehash predictably nonproductive positions on the conflict. From Camp David to Cast Lead: Essays on Israel, Palestine, and the Future of the Peace Process (Lexington, February) offers up shocking news, such as: Avi Shlaim finds Ariel Sharon a bit too aggressive on the issue of the Palestinians! Nor should anyone be surprised by what they find in the new edition of The Goldstone Report (Nation, January) edited by Philip Weiss—unless, that is, they have thus far neglected to read Michelle Goldberg’s fascinating Tablet profile of the passionately anti-Zionist blog impresario.

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Meanwhile, if you’d like to know how a literary scholar, trained in the analysis of verse, transforms herself into a noted anti-Zionist polemicist, The Jacqueline Rose Reader (Duke, February) walks you through the process. The collection includes Rose’s essays on Virginia Woolf and sundry psychoanalytic topics, an excerpt from her feminist sequel to Proust, and statements of her antipathy for Israeli policies (such as “Why Zionism Today Is the Real Enemy of the Jews”). For better or worse, Rose is the type of thinker who can acknowledge that academic boycotts of Israel have all sorts of problems—they’re “inconsistently and somewhat randomly applied,” and they shut down dialogue in precisely the situations in which open dialogue should be encouraged—but supports one anyhow, “on the grounds that, at the level of international politics, nothing is being done.”

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One productive thing that both critics and supporters of Israel could spend more time doing: learning the languages spoken and written by Israelis and Palestinians. In the same way that it is generally accepted that it is necessary to speak Chinese to write with any authority about China, or French to write about France, one wishes more of the polemicists concerned about the Middle East would acknowledge that before they begin nattering on about solutions or abuses, they might want to study up. (Rose’s 2007 book on Zionism cites untranslated sources in French and German, but not, it seems, in Hebrew or Arabic.) The new edition of Sarah Nicholsen’s Complete Biblical Hebrew (McGraw-Hill, February) won’t help much, but Shula Gilboa’s Complete Modern Hebrew: A Teach Yourself Guide (McGraw-Hill, February) might. It seems, at least, that the book’s designers have been doing their best to learn a little more about Israel: While the 2004 edition had a cover image featuring that staple of the mostly non-Hebrew speaking Diaspora, the bagel, the new one features a somewhat more appropriate sivivon, which, while not particularly “modern,” at least generally displays four Hebrew characters.

In fact, in studying the languages, one cannot help but appreciate the interdependence of Jews and Arabs in Israel. Especially if you pay attention to the slang terms cataloged by Danny Ben Israel in Zubi!: The Real Hebrew You Were Never Taught in School (Plume, February)—the subtitle of which suggests the book has set its sights pessimistically on the rather limited audience of ex-Hebrew day schoolers (who, honestly, have probably picked up at least the basic obscenities). Ben Israel justly acknowledges that “Israel owes a lot to multilayered, gloriously obscene Arabic curses” like kus ocht abuk ars, not to mention in-al abuk—and shouldn’t people who share the same ways of expressing fury and disgust be able to find some way to live in peace?

It’s not just that Jews have always told one another stories: From midrash to Walter Benjamin to “The Yada Yada” and This American Life, Jews have innovated in the theory and practice of storytelling. Take the Talmud, which an old North Carolina governor once described as “the most remarkable collection of oriental wisdom, obstruse learning, piety, blasphemy and obscenity ever got together in the world” that, to his astonishment, bears “the same relation to the Jewish law, which our judicial decisions do to our statute law.” Barry Wimpfheimer focuses, in his Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Penn, January), on a collection of “legal stories” in the Talmud, arguing that these sections suggest a new way of reading the Talmud’s peculiar combination of juridical wrangling and weird anecdotes. The whole text, he proposes—the dry jurisprudence not excepted—can be understood as different varieties of storytelling.

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Modern law is also full of stories, both amusing and appalling. In Daviborshch’s Cart: Narrating the Holocaust in Australian War Crimes Trials (Nebraska, January), David Fraser combs through trial transcripts and other documents, examining how Australian courts struggled, with limited success, to reconstruct massacres from Holocaust-era Ukraine and to mete out justice. Fraser acknowledges, among other things, that “narrating the reality of wartime conditions, occupation, and the facts of local collaboration in the mass killings of the Jewish population . . . was apparently beyond the capacities of both historical and legal discourse to explain in a way that might have been comprehensible to 1990s Australians.”

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No book, no matter how well-meaning, could live up to the title of Seymour Rossel’s The Essential Jewish Stories (Ktav, January). A prolific Reform rabbi operating out of the Houston area, Rossel serves up more than 300 narratives drawn from sources including the Talmud, Martin Buber’s hasidic tales, and random Internet sites. Inevitably, some of the absolutely essential modern Jewish stories get left out: Where’s the one about the guy who wakes up transformed into a bug, and the one about the tryst between a teenager and a piece of liver, and that brand new one about the American Jews who parachuted into occupied France to scalp Nazis?

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There’s no such thing as a simple story, as anyone who has read a classic children’s book lately can attest. Scholars have lately begun to bring all the tools of literary studies to young adult fiction and even to picture books, and Mike Cadden’s edited collection Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature (Nebraska, January) offers an introduction to the range of such academic approaches. Unsurprisingly, Jews receive plenty of attention in the collection: Among its essays, the volume includes analyses of Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events books (“Yes,” Handler says, “The Baudelaires are Jewish!”), Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1990), and the development of Hebrew kid lit.

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The so-called “ethical turn” in literary studies can more concretely be described as the spreading cult of Emmanuel Levinas in literature departments. Levinas—the thinker who imported echoes of the rabbinic tradition into postwar French philosophy—stands at the center of Steven Shankman’s latest book, newly available in paperback, Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies (SUNY, January). What better way to link the writings of figures as varied as Sima Qian, Primo Levi, Euripides, Mongo Beti, and Naguib Mahfouz—impressively, Shankman reads classical Chinese, Italian, Greek, French, and “some Arabic,” too—than through philosophical concepts pioneered by a Yiddish-speaking Litvak who taught not just at the Sorbonne, but also at a private Jewish high school in Paris?

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Though trained as a lawyer, Howard Cosell’s real vocation was for telling a particular sort of American story: the narrative behind a baseball game or a boxing match. With one of the most recognizable voices in American media—a “nasal twang,” he once called it—Cosell pioneered the locker room interview, spoke out against racism in sports, and helped establish Monday Night Football as an American institution. In There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legand of Howard Cosell (UMass, December), John Bloom offers up Cosell’s insouciance as a virtue: “It took chutzpah for a gangly, awkward Jewish kid from Brooklyn, someone with no discernible background in sports, to think that he could become a sports broadcaster.”

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Isaac Casaubon’s name remains familiar, if at all, because he was the inspiration and namesake of characters in popular narratives, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg suggest that there’s another story to be told about Casaubon in “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Harvard, January). He deserves recognition, they say, as a devoted Christian Hebraist who not only studied Talmud, but even consulted the glosses of the Rashbam. Casaubon also defended Jews, like his “rabbi,” Jacob Barnet, from Catholic accusations of deicide; too bad he isn’t around today to speak up on behalf of Jeffrey Goldberg.

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Narrativizing history isn’t quite enough; nowadays it seems that any story worth telling—from government commission reports to the discovery of radium to the quest for mathematical certainty—has to be repackaged in comic book form, too, to woo readers. Israel Rosenfeld’s DNA: A Graphic Guide to the Molecule That Shook the World (Columbia, February) is one such effort, rendering into cartoon form not just Watson and Crick’s famed description of DNA’s double helix structure, but lesser-known contributions leading up to that discovery, like “Chargaff’s Rules,” the observation of a Czernowitz-born Jewish biochemist that DNA always contains equal amounts of adenine and thymine, of guanine and cytosine. Bizarre as it might seem that genetics has now become fodder for the funny pages, there’s a measure of justice in the project: What scientist wouldn’t be flattered to see him- or herself rendered as a comic book hero?

One of the wonders of contemporary American Jewish writing is how anything can become part of a tradition, even, say, mourning one’s psychologically imbalanced mother. As if to mark the half-century birthday of the greatest modern poem on that particular subject—which has been celebrated and reissued as Kaddish and Other Poems: 50th Anniversary Edition (City Lights, December)—Adam Schwartz’s first novel, A Stranger on the Planet (Soho, January), introduces the mother of its narrator, early on, in a way that recalls Naomi Ginsberg a little: “Throughout her teenaged years Ruth had been overweight and mentally unstable. At sixteen she was hospitalized after an especially bad psychotic episode.” And before it’s over, Schwartz’s novel—which has been in the works for an unusually long time, as an excerpt of sorts appeared in The New Yorker back in 1988—has the narrator and his siblings saying you-know-what over their mom’s grave.

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Like Schwartz’s narrator, Allen Shawn has a twin sister. Shawn explains in his book Twin: A Memoir (Viking, January) that his twin, Mary, was autistic and became less a presence in his life than a persistent absence after being sent away, at age 8, to a home for troubled kids. Shawn details the effects of her disappearance on himself and on his family, including his brother Wallace, who turned out to be an actor and playwright, and his father William, who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987. In a previous memoir, Shawn recalled that in his family “there was never any denial of being Jewish, but there were no relaxed assertions of it either.”

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The heroine of Suzanne Corso’s novel Brooklyn Story (S&S/Galery, January) grows up on the opposite end from the Shawns of what Norman Podhoretz famously called “one of the longest journeys in the world … from Brooklyn to Manhattan.” In Bensonhurst, in 1978, with an alcoholic Jewish mother still resentful about the disappearance of her Italian husband, this young woman discovers some advantages to associating with a guy with mafia connections—even if that doesn’t exactly make her Orthodox grandmother kvell.

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The sad truth about Manhattan is that terrorists have targeted it for much the same reason that aspiring writers, like Corso’s protagonist, dream of making it there: because it symbolizes everything, good and bad, about American achievement, wealth, and success. Eighty years before 9/11, a bomb on Wall Street killed or injured 400—by far the most grievous such attack on American soil of its era. Jeb Rubenfeld dispatches his sleuth, Dr. Stratham Younger, to find the perpetrators in The Death Instinct (Riverhead, January). He gets help from Sigmund Freud, who, in Rubenfeld’s first thriller, gawked at New York’s Jews: After having seen them “wearing their long beards and peculiar outfits, black from head to foot,” Freud calls himself “the deepest of unbelievers,” and remarks that religion is “the universal neurosis of mankind.”

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Rubenfeld’s mysteries bring history to life metaphorically—in the sense of making historical figures vivid—but Ida Hattemer-Higgins does so more literally with her debut novel, The History of History (Knopf, January). The novel features an American Jewish woman in Berlin with a hole in her memory and a growing fascination with the wife of Joseph Goebbels, living in a city in which the legacy of Nazism instantiates itself in magically concrete ways. The protagonist’s past remains somewhat occluded until the final pages, but the real mystery here is whether or not Hattemer-Higgins will succeed in earning a position on Post-Holocaust Literature syllabi, for that week at the end, you know, after Sebald and Schlink.

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Notwithstanding the dozens of novels by and about American Jews published each year, there are still many surprising stories discovered all the time by scholars. A new collection of essays, edited by the always delightful Josh Kun and two of his colleagues at USC, turns up a variety of fascinating anecdotes in American popular culture. The Song Is Not the Same: Jews and American Popular Music (Purdue, December) includes essays on Henry Ford’s musical tastes and Yiddish in African-American scat-singing, as well as Kun’s own contribution, on the dirty Jewish divas of the 1960s nightclub scene, Belle Barth and Pearl Williams.

Like Barth and Williams, Allen Bodner’s subjects could deliver serious zingers in dark, smoke-filled halls: They did so, as amateur and professional boxers, with their fists. Bodner’s book, originally published in 1997, will now be kept in print by an academic press: When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (SUNY, January) draws inspiration not only from world champions like Barney Ross, but also from amateur pugilists like Bodner’s father, who went on to manage fighters. It can’t be very long until somebody produces a thoroughly Jewish Rocky, Million Dollar Baby, or The Fighter.

Finally, Michael Weingrad introduces a fascinating set of characters—the American Hebrew writers who insisted on publishing in Ivrit even while living in Connecticut or California—whose passionate commitments have informed Cynthia Ozick’s fiction, but who remain woefully underappreciated. Surveying the lives and work of Shimon Halkin, Gabriel Preil, and others, Weingrad’s American Hebrew Literature (Syracuse, December) ends on an ambivalent note with a profile of Robert Whitehill, who was raised in Lubbock, Texas, where his family gave him a Christmas tree and no bar mitzvah—and yet he has successfully transformed himself into a Hebrew poet, publishing verse in respected Israeli journals. Whitehill remains a resolute Texan, though, even in Hebrew: “On the day I die,” he begins one of his prose-poems, “stick my corpse in a plastic bag and ship it by refrigerated truck to Houston.”

Jews played many less well-known roles in modern German popular culture. Marline Otte surveys Jews’ performances in Germany’s circuses, Yiddish-language theaters, and revue theaters in her study—soon available, as a print-on-demand paperback, for a whopping $73 off the 2006 hardcover price—titled Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, February). Otte takes farces and pratfalls seriously, “exploring the astonishing subtlety in the humor and art of the barely literate, of those German Jews who spoke in unfamiliar ways, turning their bodies into metaphors.”

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While Otte’s clowns and comedians are long forgotten, their literary counterparts earned worldwide attention. Franz Werfel, the expressionist playwright who attended school with Kafka in Prague, has now had his final untranslated novel rendered into English as Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand (David R. Godine, December). Werfel started writing this tale of a married Austrian diplomat and the Jewish girl he once loved in 1940, after anti-Semitism forced him to flee Vienna; by year’s end, he found his way to—where else?—Hollywood. Werfel’s contemporary, and fellow adoptive Californian, Thomas Mann, likewise inspires a perpetual frenzy of translations, scholarly studies, and critical reevaluations. For example, Todd Kontje’s Thomas Mann’s World: Empire, Race, and the Jewish Question (Michigan, December) reconsiders Mann’s Jewish characters in the context of his engagements with German imperialism and racism and in light of some nasty remarks that have surfaced in the Nobel laureate’s letters and diaries.

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It is a tragic irony, but no surprise, that German literary postmodernism likewise takes Jewishness as a core concern—especially because that postmodernism can be understood as originating in the Nazis’ concentration camps, where, somewhat astonishingly, a few brave souls found the energy to write verse. Now available in an affordable paperback, Andrés Nader’s Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933-1945 (Camden House, December) not only offers sharp analysis of such poetry but also includes an appendix with the full text of these poems in both German and English.

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It didn’t take very long, after the war, for aesthetic experimentalism and the trauma of the Holocaust to coalesce into postmodernist fiction. What has taken longer is for American critics to accept this as a fact of literary history: As recently as 2009, a New York Times reviewer evinced surprise that H.G. Adler used “the instruments of 20th-century literature to depict the dislocations of spirit and consciousness caused by the genocide against the Jews” in a style that “could be called Holocaust modernism, an improbable formulation if ever there was one.” Improbable? In what sense is that improbable? Adler—a Prague native who unlike Werfel did not manage to escape and spent years in Theresienstadt and two weeks in Auschwitz—embraced such a literary approach not only in 1962’s The Journey (the subject of that Times review), but even earlier in Panorama (Random, January), which he began to write in 1948, though it went unpublished until 1968.

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By now, Holocaust postmodernism is ubiquitous not only in the form of novels but also in big-budget movies. William Donahue’s Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s Nazi Novels and Their Films (Palgrave, December) explores one of the most widely circulated examples, Schlink’s The Reader (1995), tracking its reception—it earned Oprah’s seal of approval, cementing its status as a massive international bestseller even before Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes signed on to star in the Hollywoodization—and contextualizing it among the author’s other works.

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The colossal sales of books like Schlink’s must be one of the primary reasons that translations from the German continue to appear in the United States with unusual regularity. Among the latest such publications is Johanna Adorján’s An Exclusive Love (Norton, January), a fictionalized memoir by the granddaughter of Jews who survived the war. Like several recent books written in English, the book tells the tale of Hungarian Jews—in this case, a couple who, having survived Nazism and communism, committed suicide in 1991. “Is it typically Jewish,” the author wonders, “to kill yourself after you have survived the Holocaust—so then you determine for yourself how you want to die?” And, one could add, is it now typically Hungarian Jewish to reimagine into literary prose the lives of one’s forebears?

Do women and men pray differently? Among Orthodox Jews, they sure do, starting with that infamous morning blessing in which men thank their creator for not making them female, while women thank Him for being created in His image. That sort of anti-egalitarianism has a long, complex pedigree, as Ross Shepard Kraemer demonstrates in Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (Oxford, December). Treating the Talmud’s discussions of female Torah scholarship, Severus of Minorca’s Jewish women who resist conversion, and many other ancient sources, Kraemer makes clear that religious practices in the time of the Romans both contributed to and reflected the construction of gender differences in those times—uncannily anticipating Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

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Those who wish to celebrate religion as it is experienced particularly by women have an increasingly deep well to draw from. A dancer and yoga instructor with an interest in religious practices, Cia Sautter presents The Miriam Tradition: Teaching Embodied Torah (Illinois, November), which identifies the Sephardic women who traditionally danced and played music in celebration of Jewish events as the models for a form of spiritual and cultural engagement that goes beyond the textual. As Sautter notes on her blog: “Torah is awesome—so how can you confine it to what is written in a book alone?” Not that books of tkhines and translated Yiddish Bibles haven’t been endeavoring to meet Jewish women’s religious needs for hundreds of years. A more recent entry in that important literary tradition can be found in Enya Tamar Keshet’s In Her Voice: An Illuminated Book of Prayers for Jewish Women (Toby, November). An Israeli artist, Keshet enlivens traditional and more recent women’s prayers—assembled with the help of Joel B. Wolowelsky of the Yeshiva of Flatbush—with a lavish visual style that argues for their value as a sacred texts.

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Most such projects have been made possible thanks to the opening of the American academy to feminist scholars in the 1970s, a development that transformed Jewish Studies (and, for that matter, just about every disciplinary nook and methodological cranny of the contemporary university). Yale’s Paula Hyman has been one stalwart leader of this development. Edited by her fellow historians Marion Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore and containing contributions from many of the current leading modern historians, both male and female, a collection of essays titled Gender and Jewish History (Indiana, December) honors Hyman by illustrating just how unthinkable it would be to study Jews or Judaism nowadays without thinking deeply and particularly about women.

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As unthinkable, we might say, as the history of cosmetics without Jews, and specifically without Helena Rubinstein. While a recent biography of Rubinstein—a Polish Jew who rose to the top of her industry, earning millions in both New York and Paris—is so far available only in French, Ruth Brandon’s forthcoming Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L’Oreal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good (Harper, February) tells the make-up doyenne’s tale alongside that of Eugène Schueller, the Frenchman who founded L’Oréal and collaborated greedily with the Nazis during the Vichy occupation. Rubinstein, by contrast, personally fought anti-Semitism. In one telling case, when she discovered a Park Avenue apartment building would not rent to Jews, she just bought the whole building.

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Lori Harrison-Kahan’s brilliant new cultural history takes its impetus from a different sort of makeup, long out of fashion: the burnt cork used to “black up” for blackface performances by men like Al Jolson (see The Jazz Singer)—but also, as she reminds us, by Jewish women. In The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (Rutgers, December), Harrison-Kahan shows that such women complicate the widely embraced idea, promulgated by Michael Rogin, that Jews blacked up to assert their own whiteness, while also offering enlightening readings of authors like Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst.

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Want to observe one contemporary example of Black-Jewish encounters firsthand? It’s easy: Hang out in any Park Slope playground on a warm weekday afternoon, and you’ll see a gaggle of privileged Jewish toddlers and their West Indian nannies. Tamara Mose Brown’s Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community (NYU, January) offers a window onto this phenomenon. A Canadian of Trinidadian descent and a Park Slope mother herself, as well as a CUNY sociologist, Brown does not emphasize the prevalence of Jewish families in the Slope but studies the nannies themselves and the social connections they establish to combat the instability of their careers. (One of the community organizers Brown interviewed from her dissertation did opine that “us black people are not as determined as the Jews. … The Jews get so much because of what they went through, but us black people get nothing.”) For a Jewish perspective on the phenomenon of Caribbean baby nurses hired by Jewish couples, decades earlier and on the Upper West Side, see the final few short stories in Norma Rosen’s 1967 collection Green.

It’s a strange juncture in the history of moral education when a student can just as conveniently purchase a term paper for his or her Business Ethics class as sit down and write one. But well-meaning educators persist: For the past two decades, the Elie Wiesel Foundation has doled out annual prizes for student essays offering “rational arguments for ethical action,” which contribute to the tradition Wiesel locates in texts as varied as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Dostoevsky. Some of the winners appear in An Ethical Compass: Coming of Age in the 21st Century (Yale, November). Despite the fact that many students enter such contests less out of any depth of ethical concern and more in pursuit of the $5,000 prize, and in the hopes of seeing their names in print, the gathered essays seem nothing if not sincere—and, hey, one of Wiesel’s winners turned out to be Rachel Maddow!

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The underlying premise of the Wiesel prize—that reading and writing can lead young people to ethical action—seems easy enough to dispute. (Don’t reading and writing just lead young people to the English Department, that alleged bastion of cultural relativism, giddy aestheticism, and lifelong penury?) Yet the vision of literature as morally uplifting has its share of advocates, from Oprah to child psychiatrist Robert Coles. Linda Silver, a veteran Jewish children’s librarian, agrees; she remarks that the hundreds of books she recommends in the thematically organized sections of The Best Jewish Books for Children and Teens (JPS, October) come in two flavors: “aesthetic” ones that “stimulate children’s imaginations” and “didactic” ones that “inculcate values”: “A tasty and nourishing Jewish reading diet,” Silver proclaims, “includes books of both kinds.” Yet this paragraph has itself illustrated just how shady inveterate readers and writers can be: Silver’s book appears in the same series as my own—and she gives me a kind shout-out in her introduction!—so mentioning it here constitutes at best a severe conflict of interest.

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Some books for younger readers do undoubtedly, unavoidably, edify them. Esther M. Friesner’s Threads and Flames (Penguin, November, 10+), for one example, features a 13-year-old Jewish immigrant girl who takes a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1910. The book, whose author is a prolific sci-fi novelist, will convince its eager readers, one hopes, at the very least to think twice before accepting employment in sweatshops with insufficient fire safety precautions.

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Whether or not they read and write, no one could deny that the stories youths tell themselves matter, especially when they grow up in tense environments. Psychologist Phillip L. Hammack argues just this in Narrative and the Politics of Identity: The Cultural Psychology of Israeli and Palestinian Youth (Oxford, December): “social scientists, peace activists, and practitioners of conflict resolution must consider young Israeli and Palestinian lives as stories in process.” He criticizes programs like Seeds of Peace, though, for not sufficiently taking “into account … the structural violence that frames the experience of Israeli and Palestinian youth.”

One could understand Lorraine Lotzof Abramson’s My Race: A Jewish Girl Growing up Under Apartheid in South Africa (DBM, November) as a retrospective attempt to tell such a story, of childhood in a place rife with political conflict and structural violence. Born in South Africa in 1946, she grew up alongside apartheid, in a family of Ashkenazi immigrants who were uncomfortable with racist state policies but remained complicit by not actively protesting them. The solution she found to the ethical compromises necessary for life under Apartheid was, in a sense, to run away: A track star and winner of multiple gold medals at the 1965 Maccabi games, she also met her husband there, an American who was her ticket to a country where she wouldn’t feel unwillingly complicit in institutionalized racism.

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It’s the same old story: Literary scholars have in the last decade or so decided that literary transnationalism is all the rage, and now Jewish literature scholars are reminding them that modern Jewish literature is, as literary scholars still often say, “always already” transnational. To put this in plainer language: Could there be any literary tradition that has crossed more borders, and been more centrally constituted by those crossings, than what was written by modern Jews? In Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (Penn, December) a trio of editors—Sheila Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner—introduce 15 essays that emphasize texts’ “continual movement across borders,” their “separations and syntheses.”

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The examples raised in Jelen, Kramer, and Lerner’s collection don’t begin to exhaust the subject of Jewish literature’s transnationalism. Among their other virtues, the modernist novellas of Jacob Glatstein (a.k.a., Yankev Glatshteyn), which have now finally appeared in a reasonable translation titled The Glatstein Chronicles (Yale, November), demonstrate again that Jewish stories are always in transit. Indeed, the books’ original Yiddish titles, Ven Yash iz geforn and Ven Yash iz gekumen, refer simply to the travels of the protagonist, Yash: He “went”—to his native Poland, to see his dying mother—and then he “came back.” In the process, he records the voices and travels of Americans and Europeans in the interwar years.

Like Glatshteyn, Joseph Brodsky left the land of his birth but continued to write poetry in his mother tongue in the United States; unlike Glatshteyn, he had been formally expelled from his homeland, and he took home the Nobel Prize for his poems. A biography of the exiled poet—written in Russian by his friend, the late Dartmouth Slavic professor Lev Loseff—has been translated as Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life (Yale, December). Brodsky identified as a Jew (“One hundred percent,” he said, “You can’t be more Jewish than I am”), but Loseff notes that “any ‘Jewish element’ found in his verse was roughly the same ‘Jewish element’ found in Western civilization—the Old Testament as received and interpreted by the Christian West.”

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Shachar Pinsker’s innovative cultural history Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford, December) presents another pointed case of Jewish literary transnationalism, one that unsettles simplistic narratives about the rebirth of literary Hebrew among the farmers of the yishuv. Describing the flowering of Hebrew prose fiction in cities including London, Vienna, Odessa, Homel, and Berlin, Pinsker demonstrates that the revival of Hebrew as a modern phenomenon owed at least as much to the atmosphere of European cafés and bustling avenues as it did to, say, the experience of tilling soil on a kibbutz. Thus modern Hebrew is a language of the Diaspora, of crossed borders, just like Yiddish and, for that matter, English.

Nicholas de Lange is best known as a translator of Israeli novels; the literary critic Dan Miron has praised him for “presenting the world with an Amos Oz who is by far more mature, restrained, and precise than the Hebrew writer actually was.” When he’s not translating, he has plenty of other scholarly commitments to keep him busy. One such commitment is a 2001 volume of essays he edited, out soon as an affordable paperback (a steal at $36, next to the $104 hardcover). Titled Hebrew Scholarship and the Medieval World (Cambridge, December), the book includes articles by a variety of international scholars, addressing the place of Hebrew in the thought and culture of the medieval world, including its use in poetic and liturgical writings and questions about the degree to which the language was known and influenced by Christian and Muslim intellectuals. Most compelling, perhaps, are essays surveying recent developments in the study of medieval Hebrew, including de Lange’s own piece on Hebrew scholarship in Byzantium.

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Another collection of academic essays—Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond (Palgrave, November)—shows how intent Spanish scholars are to advance research on Jewish culture, in all its myriad forms, during the historical period when Jews were still present in large numbers in Spain and Portugal. Edited by a pair of academics based in Madrid and Granada, the book includes contributions from an impressive sampling of American, European, and Israeli scholars and emphasizes the linguistic, cultural, and geographic complexities of Jews’ experiences in the years both before and after the Inquisition. Given the dolorous history, that Spanish universities are now becoming centers for scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies feels rather satisfying: Roll in your grave, Torquemada, you mamzer, roll!

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Having escaped the Inquisition, many Sephardic Jews were by the beginning of the 16th century already scattered throughout a variety of locations in Asia, Africa, and Europe. And, as we know from more recent immigrations, it isn’t always easy for newcomers to get along with the local bigwigs who have their own established ideas about how to run things. The six academic essays collected by Julia Lieberman in Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (UPNE, December) explore the day-to-day lives of these far-flung Jews as their practices and traditions clashed with those of the Jews who were their new neighbors in the Ottoman empire. Meanwhile, Harry Toledano declares in The Sephardic Legacy: Unique Features and Achievements (Scranton, November) that as challenging as that dispersion was for the exiled, these Jews carried with them key influences and traditions from the Golden Age in Spain that would form the basis of Sephardic identity and pride.

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Meanwhile, back in Ashkenaz … The city focused on by Nils Roemer in German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms (UPNE, December) was one of many where Hebrew flourished in the Middle Ages, at least in the work of its local celebrity. Roemer’s interest is in the continuities between the medieval city and its modern instantiations, and relations between Jews and Germans, before and after the tragedies of the Holocaust.

In German cities like Worms and elsewhere in Mitteleuropa, having a few Hebrew books kicking around on your shelves could, at times, be a downright dangerous proposition. At the beginning of the 16th century, for one shocking example, a push was made by some Christians to destroy all extant Jewish literature, which was thought to be corrupting and offensive. (And this, centuries before Al Goldstein’s birth!) Led by a Jewish apostate, Johannes Pfefferkorn, the campaign—already familiar from the early chapters of Sander Gilman’s Jewish Self-Hatred (1990)—gets retold in detail in David Price’s Humanism and Judaism: Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (Oxford, December), on the basis of new archival findings. Reuchlin, a leading Christian Hebraist, paid dearly for his attempts to defend Jews and found himself accused of having been bamboozled by Jewish bribery.

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If they wanted some really freaky Jewish books, those sourpuss Germans should have learned a little Yiddish; that’s one message to take away from Tablet contributing editor (and author of an eagerly anticipated Nextbook Press book on Sholem Aleichem) Jeremy Dauber’s In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (Yale, December). Offering an insightful tour of the neglected, rich Old Yiddish literature that preceded the quintessentially modern tales of Mendele and Pertez, Dauber’s book is also a reminder that Isaac Bashevis Singer had key precedents for his Yiddish tales of crotchety devils.

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Several hundred miles northwest, across the channel, early modern Englishmen under Queen Elizabeth I and her successors had their own reasons for fretting a whole lot about Jews. The Reformation was a good excuse for rethinking the relationship of Christianity to its progenitor, and the question of whether Jews should be allowed to return to live in England or not was up for debate. Addressing these developments and many others, Achsah Guibbory’s Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in 17th-Century England (Oxford, November) illustrates that these are crucial contexts in which we can read poets like Herrick, Milton, and Dryden, especially when their poems include lines like the latter’s apt question, “When will our reason’s long-charm’d eyes unclose, / And Israel judge between her friends and foes?”

Taking credit for an achievement as monumental as the founding of a modern state seems a rather foolhardy thing to do. Take, for example, the young man born David Green in Płońsk, Poland, in 1886, known just about universally as the founding father of the state of Israel. What does he get for his troubles? An airport named for him, which Israelis pass through when they’re getting the hell out of the Middle East. Worse yet, he also became, as Shlomo Aronson notes in his new book David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance (Cambridge, November), “a kind of pariah, the root of all the incurable evils of contemporaneous Israeli society,” at least for those who abjured his policy decisions and philosophy. Aronson’s book proposes to weigh Ben Gurion’s legacy as a “leader-intellectual,” to take him seriously without giving him a pass.

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Central among the complaints raised by Ben-Gurion’s detractors, then and now, is that he failed to erect what an American founding father, Thomas Jefferson, famously called “a wall of separation between Church and State.” Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a colleague of Aronson’s at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, describes in Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism (Oxford, November) how Ben-Gurion declared, in October 1950, that maintenance of the “status quo” should be the principle guiding the Israeli government’s approach to “religious issues,” without defining what, precisely, such issues were. As Ben-Yehuda tells it, the result has been a nation in which the relationship between religious and secular interests is subject to perennial renegotiation. And in which some haredim—in the hope of transforming Israel’s theocratic democracy into a genuine theocracy—have systematically engaged in behavior that Ben-Yehuda, as a social scientist, refers to as “deviant.”

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Fascinatingly, even the extremists among Israeli religious Jews partake in modern culture, in their own ways. In his study Beyond Political Messianism: The Poetry of Second Generation Religious Zionist Settlers (Academic Studies, December), Brown University’s David Jacobson explores a number of second-generation settlers in the West Bank who turn to poetry as a means of self-expression, exploring aesthetic and political questions in verse to reflect upon both their biblical models and their daily lives.

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Before this summer’s flotilla fiasco, there was rarely much reason to think about Israel’s navy. Sure, the country has plenty of coastline to defend, but with so many enemy states just a short jeep ride away, who would bother to attack by sea? Ze’ev Almog, a retired rear admiral, explains in Flotilla 13: Israeli Commandos in the Red Sea, 1967-1973 (Naval Institute, November) that, in fact, some maritime engagements he led—knocking out enemy radar stations, incapacitating the Egyptian navy during the Yom Kippur War—were key strategic victories.

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“Why is it,” Alan Mintz asked back in 2001, “that when Hebrew literature has come of age and finds itself in the midst of its greatest boom that American Jewish readers, so cultured and so committed to Israel, should have so little use for it?” The question continues to resonate even as more and more Israeli authors appear in serviceable English editions.

Yishai Sarid, a lawyer with a graduate degree from Harvard, has his English debut in Limassol (Europa, November), a thriller featuring a secret-serviceman who goes undercover as an aspiring writer to ingratiate himself with a Palestinian poet.

Sarid’s novel takes its title from a Cypriot city, while Zeruya Shalev’s latest novel to be translated is named for a Greek isle. Shalev is no stranger to translation: Her novel Love Life appeared in English in 2000 and in 23 other languages including Macedonian, Vietnamese, and Slovenian. The new one, Thera (Toby, November), concerns an archaeologist whose family is quickly transforming itself into a ruin.

Yael Hedaya, meanwhile, is better known by Americans than most of her Israeli peers because of the reverent transformation of the hit TV series for which she served as head writer, B’Tipul, into HBO’s In Treatment. (She’s also an alumna of NYU’s creative writing program.) Hedaya’s third novel, a study of suburban disaffection ironically titled Eden (Metropolitan, November)—which, one reviewer has pointed out, has been responsibly abridged in translation—bears some resemblance to the TV series in that one of its characters, a teenage girl, has an affair with a much older man. There’s a reason, Hedaya recently told New York, that she so often returns to the plot device of younger women seducing older men: “I had a lot of relationships with older men when I was her age.”

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Hadaya’s fictional moshav isn’t the only Israeli community with restless and unsatisfied residents. The geographer Steven Dinero argues in Settling for Less: The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin (Berghahn, November) that, on balance, it has not been an entirely positive development for the formerly nomadic Bedouin to put down roots in Segev Shalom, a town established specifically for them near Beer Sheva in 1979.

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Still, another Israeli planned city can be celebrated as a triumph: In Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities (Scribner, November), the urbanist Witold Rybczynski points to Modi’in, a development conceived by the architect Moshe Safdie and built from scratch as recently as the late 1980s and early 1990s, as a success to be emulated. With its out-of-sight, underground parking and “landscaped walks that … recall the pedestrian stairs of San Francisco and Montmartre,” Modi’in provides, Rybczynski declares, “some useful lessons for achieving a denser and greener—in both senses—urbanism” here in the United States. How lovely would it be to see Hartford or Detroit revitalized through emulation of this Israeli example?

There is something inherently ridiculous, and lovely, about The Encyclopedia of New York City (Yale, November), a second, expanded edition of which has now been produced under the editorial direction of Columbia University historian Kenneth T. Jackson. Ridiculous, because the city is itself already an infinite, Borgesian encyclopedia of all the world’s culture—and lovely because the place is also home to so many bookish idealists who continue to dream, along with Jackson, that a book can reflect all of that life. Similar in dimensions to a phonebook, but hard-covered with hundreds of illustrations, the book can hardly be blamed for giving short shrift to Bukharan Jews (who merit just a single sentence in the Forest Hills entry) or Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant (which does not seem to be mentioned at all) when it is obviously trying so hard to edify with some 5,000 brief but useful entries on key subjects ranging from ABRAMS V. UNITED STATES to ZABAR’S.

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Harry Houdini moved to New York City in 1882, at the age of 8. What better place to develop as an escape artist than in the city where most everyone is “sealed and hog-tied,” as Michael Chabon has pointed out, to their boroughs—not to mention their overbearing families? As Rachel Shteir discussed here earlier this month, the current show at the Jewish Museum, “Houdini: Art and Magic,” emphasizes the performer’s roots—he was born Erich Weiss in Budapest, and his father was a Reform rabbi—and his influence on visual artists. The accompanying catalog, Houdini: Art and Magic (Yale, November), pulls off a neat magic trick of its own: A sumptuous coffee-table book, it delights and informs on every page, with photographs of the escapist’s diaries and handcuffs, as well as interviews with Houdiniphiles including E.L. Doctorow.

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To carp that a printed encyclopedia is incomplete is to miss the point (especially in the age of Wikipedia, as Jackson rightly notes): Thus, in selecting hundreds of performers to discuss in his Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (Pantheon, November), Will Friedwald follows his personal tastes through 800 pages of anecdotes and musical insights, in which he discusses the works of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, of course, but also saves room for Sophie Tucker, Harold Arlen, and Ethel Merman.

Still, some reference works strive ambitiously for comprehensiveness: Kenneth Jaffe’s Solo Vocal Works on Jewish Themes: A Bibliography of Jewish Composers (Scarecrow, October), for example. A Reform cantor in California, Jaffe has compiled a list of 3,000 oratorios, operas, liturgical pieces, symphonies, and stage works composed throughout history by Jews, about Jews, and presents this massive list annotated with bibliographic information and indexed by theme. Useful for musicians, cultural historians, and anyone who likes singing classics of the Yiddish theater in the shower.

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Jackson’s encyclopedia gives George Gershwin a column; Larry Starr, a music historian at the University of Washington, treats the composer—“the Brooklyn-born son of an immigrant Jewish couple from Russia” and “an aggressive assimilationist”—at greater length in his still admirably concise George Gershwin (Yale, November). Starr focuses particularly on Gershwin’s Broadway shows—Lady, Be Good (1924), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935)—arguing that the musical sensibilities Gershwin developed in those projects continued to inform him throughout the rest of his career. Among other things, Starr notes that “late in 1929 Gershwin was involved in serious discussions with the Metropolitan Opera regarding a work to be based on the S. Ansky play The Dybbuk, which fell through when the rights weren’t available.”

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In Paul Auster’s 2005 novel The Brooklyn Follies, a cabaret performer takes the stage “not as a singer, but as a faux-singer, mouthing the words of show tunes and jazz standards by legendary female vocalists” (like Lena Horne as others covered in Friedwald’s Biographical Guide). Given Auster’s postmodern experiments, one has to wonder to what degree he, too, aspires to be a faux-novelist, self-consciously performing generic conventions pioneered and perfected by others, whether he’s writing postmodern detective novels or multi-perspectival narratives of contemporary Brooklyn life, like Sunset Park (Holt, November). The new novel tracks a strained father-son relationship as the son joins an illegal squat in the titular Brooklyn neighborhood to the north of Bay Ridge, and it has so far received mixed reviews, which Auster is sensible enough not to read: “You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. … And that doesn’t do you any good as a human being at all.”

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Born in 1931, Judith Viorst grew up with much of the great popular American music. Indeed, she takes the epigraph for her new book of poems, Unexpectedly Eighty and Other Adaptations (Free Press, October), from a 1963 Gordon Jenkins tune, “This Is All I Ask,” that has been performed by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Tony Bennett. The author of classic children’s books including Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (1972), Viorst still enjoys herself on the verge of her ninth decade, Metamucil and CAT scans be damned. “Jews are survivors to some extent because they use humor to get them through,” she recently told an interviewer, and she does, dispensing joyful, semi-sarcastic wisdom like the bubbe that she is: “Life,” she says, “is not about seeing the glass half empty or half full. The point is that you have a glass.”

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Ash Levine, the protagonist of Miles Corwin’s debut novel, Kind of Blue (Oceanview, November), is another music lover: As the title indicates, he’s serious about Miles Davis. An LAPD detective who comes out of retirement to investigate the murder of another ex-officer, Levine, like an increasing number of thriller heroes, has ties to the Israeli military—he’s a veteran of the IDF. Corwin, who reported for years on the Los Angeles Times crime beat and now teaches in the English department at U.C. Irvine, got to know the grittier parts of his hometown as a young kid, when he lived in the Rosslyn Hotel, a landmark in downtown L.A., “at the edge of Skid Row,” which his grandfather owned.

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Andrew Furman, a scholar of American Jewish literature at Florida Atlantic University, turns to his own Los Angeles adolescence—specifically, his tenure on his high-school’s basketball team—in My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White (Syracuse, November) as a window onto the complex question of school busing programs intended to desegregate American cities. Furman’s team reflected the controversial program: Half of his teammates were from the Valley, and the other half were urban African-Americans bused to the school. To investigate the legacy of forced busing—which was opposed by a Jewish congresswoman, Bobbi Fiedler—Furman travels back home and interviews his former teammates, as well as advocates and opponents of the program, decades after the fact. Furman’s memoir is another reminder that Jewish and African-American communities have managed to harmonize better in pop music than in some other social venues, including high-school basketball.

Take a wild guess: What do you think Abe Foxman has to say about the hoary idea that Jews lust insatiably after money and dominate international finance? Remember, this is the professionally thin-skinned director of the Anti-Defamation League, whose primary gig since 1987 has been to oppose (or occasionally approve and endorse) representations of Jews in the international media. In Jews & Money: The Story of a Stereotype (Palgrave, November), he surveys the history of myths of Jewish money lust, which do still circulate today (though, thankfully, not always in venues that would appear to be fertile recruiting grounds for the Aryan Nation or Islamic Jihad).

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What’s trickiest about the pernicious myth of a shady financial cabal that controls the world’s markets is that it can be disseminated denuded of any reference to Jews. As Jonathan Freedman points out in a sharp book chapter dealing with the Left Behind series and titled “Antisemitism Without Jews,” such tropes continue to be favored among American populists and rabble-rousing evangelical Christians of our time, even if latter-day demagogues are savvy enough to know that yelling “Kill the Jews!” is just so passé. Eric Weiner’s The Shadow Market: How a Group of Wealthy Nations and Powerful Investors Secretly Dominate the World (Scribner, October) offers a rather different example of how such tropes continue to appeal even to those who wouldn’t dream of maligning a Jewish banker. Weiner never, in fact, mentions Jews—the economic threats in the book come largely from the Chinese—and no one could possibly accuse him of anti-Semitism. But a conspiracy that “secretly dominate[s] the world” through financial machinations and nefarious international bankers? Weiner’s observations might be true, even important—but presented in such sensationalistic terms, they sound a bit creepy.

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While anti-Semitic rhetoric, of one kind of another, remains a troublesome presence in American discourse, it is not typically, for the time being at least, the cause of violent acts visited on Jews. This was not the case in Eastern Europe in the years after World War I, when using pamphlets and newspapers to stir up some peasants to rape and murder the local Jews could be employed as a rather straightforward political tactic. The essays gathered into Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Indiana, November)—edited by a foursome of scholars based in Jerusalem, Oregon, and Flemingsberg, Sweden—offer insights into how modern pogroms happened, how they were in some cases staved off, and what this might teach us about contemporary threats.

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When you descend from people who have been attacked by pogromists bearing sharpened sticks and pitchforks, perhaps it’s no accident when you become an expert in advanced military technology. Not that Victor Krulak—the legendary U.S. Marine who championed the use of Higgins boats and helicopters in warfare—ever acknowledged his East European roots. But, as Robert Coram explains in Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine (Little, Brown, November), Krulak’s parents were Russian Jews who had immigrated to Denver.

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Ferocious as Krulak could be in battle, Lewis Black manages to be even more bloodthirsty in his comedy. His latest book, I’m Dreaming of a Black Christmas (Riverhead, November), attains the tone of unchecked fury one might reasonably expect if, say, Abe Foxman were asked to deliver the keynote address at a rally of the Ku Klux Klan. Is the inanity of Yuletide cheer too easy a target for American comedy’s most furious Jew? Maybe—but, then again, Black has made a fine career for himself out of an ability to get incensed about the mostly inconsequential and ubiquitous narishkeyt the rest of us manage to shrug off.

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The midterm elections are behind us, and everyone has something to worry about: whether you’re terrified that Obama remains in power, or grimly certain that it’s only a matter of time until the Tea Party storms the streets with torches and pitchforks, take solace that Yiddish intellectuals made lasting contributions to world culture even while living through the strangest and most riotous eras of political transformation. S. An-sky, for example, penned a classic play, The Dybbuk—in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew versions—as well as war diaries, ethnographies, journalism, and poetry, during the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, World War I, and the Russian Revolution. Stanford’s Gabriella Safran tells An-sky’s crucial story in Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, November).

Like An-sky, who until 1904 wrote primarily in Russian, Meir Wiener chose Yiddish after already establishing himself in another language. An Austrian scholar of Jewish mysticism who wrote in German, he moved to the Soviet Union in 1926 and committed himself to orthodox Marxism and to Yiddish culture. If Wiener’s name isn’t already familiar, that might be because of the linguistic and logistical obstacles to understanding his rich and fascinating career: In From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford, November), the University of Michigan’s Mikhail Krutikov surveys his output in German, Yiddish, and Russian and argues that the radical transformations of Wiener’s career are not exactly contradictions, but typical of the dynamism of Jewish intellectual activity in the early 20th century.

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In a sense, German-speaking Jews had already established models for multifaceted intellectuals like An-sky and Wiener in the 18th and 19th centuries. Moses Mendelssohn, for example, was a philosopher whom even Immanuel Kant could admire, and he also produced one of the most socially influential translations ever, of the Torah into German. The eminent Israeli intellectual historian Shmuel Feiner explores the personal and professional life of this crucial thinker in Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity (Yale, November).

Samson Raphael Hirsch, for another example, was an intellectual forebear of the movement now recognized as Modern Orthodoxy; in addition to a number of leadership positions, he wrote a commentary on the Torah in German and translated the Psalms, while also founding the Freie Vereinigung für die Interessen des Orthodoxen Judentums, an organization of Jewish communities that would inspire the founders of Agudat Yisrael. Michael Miller contextualizes Hirsch’s activities in the particular history of the region for which he served as chief rabbi in Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation (Stanford, November), which also surveys the achievements of other key Moravians including the Talmudist Mordecai Benet and Hirsch’s ideological opponent Hirsch Fassel. Miller’s study emphasizes that even a relatively small region—in 1754, only 20,000 Jews lived in Moravia, while 750,000 lived in the nearby territories of Poland and Lithuania—can produce world-class intellectuals, whose polemics continue to matter centuries later.

NOTE: This article has been edited to clarify that Eric Weiner’s book is not in any sense anti-Semitic.

Can anyone—especially anyone who reads book reviews—doubt that the Holocaust is still with us? Even as the horrors themselves grow more distant, scholars continue to demonstrate how the Holocaust still resonates. In Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (Columbia, November), for one instance, the psychoanalytically inclined literary scholar Gabriele Schwab reads second-generation narratives by Germans and Jews—including Ruth Kluger, Georges Perec, W.G. Sebald, and Sabine Reichel—to explore the ways that the crimes of 1939 to 1945 play out decades later for descendants of victims and perpetrators both. Delayed responses to trauma interest Schwab for personal reasons, she explains: Not until 1987, when she was already a professor in California, did she realize that Jews might have once lived in Tiegen, the small German town on the Swiss border where she had grown up.

The idea of trauma passing from one generation to the next does not sit well with all observers of post-Holocaust art and memorials. In The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, October), Richard Crownshaw examines recent artistic and memorial responses to the Holocaust—not to mention the trauma theory that grows atop such representations—with a measured skepticism about the increasingly accepted idea that trauma can be transmitted, passed along from the Nazis’ victims to people who weren’t born, in many cases, until half a century after the war.

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Writing for The New Republic and other respected publications, Ruth Franklin has constructed a rather impressive career as a non-academic critic who focuses her energies largely on literary responses to the Holocaust—which in and of itself says something about the proliferation of such texts. (It tells us, specifically, that “Holocaust literature” is, at least according to the editors of intellectual magazines, as deserving and sensible a critical specialization as American, British, French, or Russian literature, if not even more so.) Franklin’s first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford, November), reexamines canonical texts in this tradition—Wiesel, Levi, Borowski, Rawicz, Sebald—arguing that readers should be less uptight about factuality in representations of the Holocaust (a point the box office and critical acclaim for Inglourious Basterds suggests is not such a hard sell, except to a handful of curmudgeonly hold-outs).

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While critics debate the hows and whys of Holocaust representation, historians and artists continue to mine the archives for new Holocaust stories to tell, or old narratives they can relate in new ways. Dan Porat, who teaches at the Hebrew University, for one, reanimates that old cliché about a photograph and a thousand words. Taking a single iconic image from the Holocaust as his starting point, he spins out somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 words about it, tracing the biographies of the Nazi soldiers and Jewish victims in the scene from their prewar lives until the death of the last survivor. The result is The Boy: A Holocaust Story (Hill & Wang, October), an unusual project that UCLA’s David Meyer characterizes as “provocatively pushing the limits of the historian’s craft.”

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In some cases, it seems that stories are retold just for the sake of retelling them. It will never stop astonishing us that Raoul Wallenberg saved so many Hungarian Jews, and it will never stop troubling us that great artists accommodated themselves to the Vichy regime—and we will never stop, it seems, having new books to read on these subjects. The most recent examples, in these two categories, respectively, are The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II (Da Capo, October), by the prolific British journalist Alex Kershaw, and And the Show Went On (Knopf, October) by Alan Riding, a longtime cultural correspondent for The New York Times. Unlike trauma victims who return in memory, again and again, involuntarily, to their difficult experiences, these returns to well-trod ground seem to be produced primarily by the inefficiencies of the book market.

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Which isn’t to say that there aren’t new ways of understanding the horrors of the Holocaust, or less familiar narratives to present. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic, October) is an example of the former. Shifting the frame of reference and unsettling accepted pieties in the study of Eastern Europe under the Nazis and the Communists, Snyder argues that the Holocaust and Stalin’s terror need to be understood in relation to each other and in the context of the sustained and brutal exchanges of power in the lands between Berlin and Moscow. That’s where the vast majority of the Holocaust’s victims came from, along with many millions of others—Ukrainians and other nationals seen as expendable or threatening by continent-conquering dictators—who were purged or starved to death.

In the latter category: Christiane Kohl’s The Witness House: Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa During the Nuremberg Trials (Other, September), translated from German by Anthea Bell, which describes the compound on the outskirts of Nuremberg that housed the prosecution, defense, and witnesses during the famous war crimes trials of 1945. What fascinates Kohl, a German journalist, is the idea that so soon after the killing stopped, members of the resistance and Nazi functionaries could bunk down as roommates—a fitting metaphor for postwar Europe as a whole, where the innocent and guilty would have to learn to live together.

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Valuable as historical narratives and literary treatments of the Holocaust can be, the sound of a single survivor’s voice has astonishing power. In 1946, an American psychologist named David Boder traveled to Europe with a steel wire recorder and conducted interviews with 130 survivors of the catastrophe, Christian and Jewish, in nine languages. Already familiar to assiduous listeners of This American Life, and available for listening (and reading of interview transcripts in English translation) on an impressive website maintained by the Illinois Institute of Technology, Boder’s project is now the subject of Alan Rosen’s The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford, October). Contextualizing the recordings in terms of early and later survivor testimony, Rosen—a former student of Elie Wiesel’s who now teaches at Yad Vashem in Israel—establishes Boder’s position among the earliest, heroic archivists of Holocaust testimony. And no fancy trauma theory is required to argue that Boder’s recordings still matter: Just give them a listen.

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Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic (Algonquin, October), for one appositely titled example, guides readers back to fin de siècle Vienna, where a young Jewish clerk lusts after a young lady he spots at the theater one night with a certain Dr. Freud. Evincing its own lust for history, folklore, and collisions of the two, Skibell’s book introduces its protagonist not just to the granddaddy of psychoanalysis, but also to Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, the Jewish doctor who invented Esperanto. Further complicating matters is the hero’s father, who speaks entirely in Biblical quotations, rendered here in Hebrew characters as well as in translation—and, finally, one tenacious dybbuk.

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Concerned as much with the failure of romance as with its successes, Andrew Winer’s The Marriage Artist (Henry Holt, October) likewise evinces a fascination with the mating habits of Jews in pre-WWII Austria. It shuttles between the contemporary New York art scene and 1928 Vienna, where a young boy learns the art of ketubah embellishment from his Ostjude grandfather. Love isn’t exactly idealized in the novel (lovers argue, undermine each other, divorce, and throw themselves out of windows), but Winer’s art critic protagonist protests that loving “painfully” is inevitable, at least for him and his Russian Jewish flame: “Was there any other way for two people to love each other … when they were each married to someone else?”

If Winer’s novel’s structure—alternating chapters that link Jewish characters across a linguistic and/or historical divide, with a touch of typographical whimsy thrown in at the end for good measure—were to be named after its most iconic practitioner, it would have to be called Foerian Alternation. The History of Love (2005), by Nicole Krauss, is a prime example of that narrative strategy (and before publishing it, Krauss married the technique’s namesake). Great House (Norton, October), her third novel, ups the ante, joining four narrative strands, through its characteristically alternating chapters set in New York, Jerusalem, London, and Oxford. Given their ambition and playfulness, there’s reason to fear an exponential series developing between these two talented writers: Foer’s next novel featuring 16 intertwining stories, Krauss’ 256, then Foer’s next 65,536, ad infinitum.

The index case of Foerian Alernation was, of course, the popular Everything Is Illuminated (2002), in which a young writer with the same name as the book’s author confects a magical, technicolor vision of a Ukranian shtetl that owes more to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the fables of Jorge Luis Borges than to anything that Jews have ever said or done. Which is to say that Foer’s project was precisely not to write what has now been published, with a preface by Foer himself, as The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod (Pegasus, October). In it, Avrom Bendavid-Val attempts to uncover the actual history of the locale that Foer’s protagonist employed as a blank canvas upon which his imagination could run riot.

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Like Foer’s and Krauss’ clever children and adolescents, the protagonists of Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares (Knopf, October)—a follow-up by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan to their tikkun olam­-mentioning, Michael Cera-driven-adaptation-producing Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist—are at times impossibly charming. In the words of one blogger: “It’s just so so so so so so so CUH-YUTE—the romance!” The novel gets started during Christmas break when boy meets girl’s Moleskin notebook (at the Strand! among J. D. Salinger’s books!) and follows the 16-year-olds (in alternating chapters!) as they trade dares and flirt and act pretty damn adorable. Oh, and there’s also, unsurprisingly, a “gay Jewish dancepop/indie/punk band called Silly Rabbi, Tricks Are for Yids.”

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Naomi Ragen’s take on contemporary Jewish romance is much less happy-go-lucky: Her latest novel, The Tenth Song (St. Martin’s, October), begins with a woman delighting in “the answer to every Jewish mother’s prayer” who will soon marry her daughter, a Harvard Law student, when a piece of bad news arrives: her accountant husband’s arrest “for transferring money to support terrorist organizations that are responsible for the deaths of American soldiers.” This impels the whole family to travel to Israel, where they can reconsider their values.

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Before romance novels began crowding the racks at supermarkets, there were romantics: the 19th-century kind, like the composer Gustav Mahler. The British novelist and classical-music journalist Norman Lebrecht makes a decidedly personal case for the continuing relevance of that particular sort of romantic in his widely panned Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World (Pantheon, October). Among other aims, the book pushes what one reviewer describes as Lebrecht’s deeply held, though not widely accepted, belief that Mahler, who converted to Catholicism so as to take a gig directing the Vienna Court Opera, “was not … uneasy about, or in flight from his Jewish background, but rather fully and even happily determined by it.”

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All romances end. Even the passionate, eccentric ones, like the marriage of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter and his second wife, Antonia Fraser—“the working-class Jewish boy from the East End and the Catholic aristocrat with her title,” who found common ground in their mutual membership in what she calls “the Bohemian class.” Fraser, a biographer, chronicles their relationship in Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter (Nan A. Talese, November), a mix of her diaries and more recent reflections, which one reviewer has described as having “at times a bosom-heaving, lace-handkerchief-fluttering quality.” Torrid as the relationship may have been—it began, scandalously, with an all-night, extramarital lovemaking session that Fraser recalls—it could not outlive Pinter’s death in 2008. Except in the form of this book, of course, where, like other literary romances, it will outlive all of us.

“Tradition” is an odd word: In addition to what Chaim Topol’s Tevye meant when he belted it out—that is, more or less what Yiddish speakers refer to as mesore—it also used to mean, in the English of a few centuries past, “betrayal.” So, contemporary Jews are being faithful to etymology when their invocations of tradition transform historical behavior as much as they preserve it. Take, for one example, today’s kosher food business, described with aplomb by Sue Fishkoff in Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority (Schocken, October). While mashgiachs enforce centuries-old regulations for the selection and preparation of food, they do so in ways their grandfathers never would have imagined, employing technologically inventive methods in locations spanning the globe—plus, as Fishkoff fascinatingly points out, the vast majority of contemporary consumers who purchase kosher food regularly do not identify as observant Jews.

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On the other side of that same coin, practices that seem brazenly new often reinforce established community conventions. Michelle Cove’s guidebook Seeking Happily Ever After (Penguin, October) encourages single women to reject old-fashioned notions of marriage as the sole determinant of personal worth and happiness. But Cove, who edits the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute’s online zine 614, is not so radical that a Jewish grandmother couldn’t shep nakhes over her personal choices. When she turned 30, Cove decided that she’d had enough “intense, moody, creative love interests” and signed up for the online dating service that has produced more shidduchs than Gimpl Beinish: “I found my husband on JDate,” she notes, proudly, “and we now have a six-year-old J-daughter.”

Not that Jewish grandmothers should be anyone’s symbol of staid traditionalism. As the essays gathered in A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America (Rutgers, October)—edited by Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson—make clear, Jewish women in the 1950s and 1960s found their niches, pace Betty Friedan’s lament about feminine conformity, as Cold War ideologues, entrepreneurs, and edgy comediennes.

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How’s this for a nontraditional educational path? Yeshiva, then Harvard, then jail. That’s the route Avi Steinberg followed and that he recounts in his new memoir, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (Doubleday, October). While the premise smacks a little of post-Plimpton opportunistically experiential journalism—and, on that note, Steinberg has also written entertainingly about his gig as a security guard at the Republican National Convention—Steinberg offers a meaningful, unusual perspective on the U.S. prison system and on convicts’ lives, while his Jewishness spurs some of the inmates to let him know how much they respect Hasids.

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Hasidism is both intensely traditional and radically innovative, and perhaps nowhere is that paradox more evident than in what Maya Balakirsky Katz calls The Visual Culture of Chabad (Cambridge, October). With 60 illustrations, Katz’s study documents and analyzes visual phenomena including the portraiture of Lubbavitcher rebbes, ranging from pocket-size to billboard, and the spectacle of public lightings of oversize Hanukkkah candles.

Chabad is hardly alone in its transformation of ancient religious symbols into modern practices. Jews across the ideological and religious spectrum do so regularly, as scholars and community leaders suggest in essays about bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, and other commemorations in Leonard Greenspoon’s Rites of Passage: How Today’s Jews Celebrate, Commemorate, and Commiserate (Purdue, October). Based on a 2008 symposium held at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, the collection dramatizes the growing popularity of one relatively recent innovation in Jewish community ritual: the academic conference.

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Making new traditions is a long-established tradition in itself. Aaron W. Hughes explains, in The Invention of Jewish Identity: Bible, Philosophy, and the Art of Translation (Indiana, November), why Jewish intellectuals in every generation retranslate the Torah. Examining Arabic vernacular translations, he notes that “translation of the Bible was associated with the discovery or invention of an ancient aesthetic tradition,” he writes, “one that just happened to coincide with contemporary literary production.” In other words, just about anything a Jew thinks can be supported by a choice quotation from the Bible, if the original language is translated cleverly enough.

David Biale identifies examples of this process in Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton, November), demonstrating that while some secularists, like Max Nordau, rejected the Torah as a “wasteland” of “superstitious beliefs,” others, like Heine, Freud, and Ahad Ha’am, “reappropriated the Bible as a cultural, historical, or nationalist text.” While admitting he cannot effectively cover all the varied expressions of Jewish secularism in art, music, and the culture of everyday life, Biale usefully addresses a range of “programmatic and philosophical” expressions of Jewish secularism, in a project both inspired and supported by Felix Posen, the preeminent philanthropic advocate of cultural and secular Judaism.

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Anything can serve as the beginnings of a tradition, even the taboo-breaking, sui generis visual style developed by the comix artist R. Crumb—who is, of course, not Jewish himself, but a great lover of Jews, including his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Witness the drawings by their daughter, from early childhood compositions to recent, technically accomplished examples, edited by her parents into Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist (Norton, November), which the Crumbs intend not simply as a mass-produced family scrapbook but as a document of “the development, the evolution, of a given human being.” Yet family resemblance still looms large here: Sophie notes she has “let go of all that pressure of living up and being compared to ‘the legend’ ”—that is, her dad—but she sounds a lot like him when, a couple of lines later, she talks about putting “all the abnormality, perversion and zaniness onto paper,” while aiming, nonetheless, “to be a partially normal mother to my kids.”

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The interplay of abnormality, perversion, and zaniness, on the one hand, and aspiring-to-normal parenthood, on the other, also animates Matthew Lippman’s second collection of poetry, Monkey Bars (Typecast, October). “When my first kid was born,” Lippman has said, “I couldn’t write a poem. For two years. Then I started writing again, about her.” His subsequent poems take on topics like Wal-Mart and prescription drugs and include jokey lines like “I went down to the Jew Shop to buy me a Jew” alongside more serious business. Lippman’s publisher “wants stock brokers and chefs and telephone repair people and professors to read this book”, and those admirable ambitions notwithstanding, the poet himself seems not deeply concerned about what T. S. Eliot called “tradition”: Asked about his propensity to reference Buddhism, Lippman seems refreshingly unself-conscious about setting himself up for comparisons to one rather celebrated precursor in his field: “I am a Jew,” Lippman says, “who likes jazz music who finds a light in Buddhism.”

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The boundary separating Christians from Jews, in particular, is porous enough at times to encourage utopian universalism or, alternatively, to creep everybody out. Such crossings originate with shared texts like the biblical book of Ruth, the go-to reading for interfaith wedding ceremonies of all sorts. Thus, even though the story seems to valorize a Moabite willing to embrace Judaism out of loyalty to her mother-in-law, Walter Wangerin Jr., a Lutheran pastor and prolific storyteller, can comfortably novelize it without traducing Christian beliefs in Naomi and Her Daughters (Zondervan, September), which Publisher’s Weekly calls “midrashic.”

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In modern Europe, the potential surprises and discomforts that can be generated by Jewish-Christian encounters seem limitless. Take Aaron Lustiger, a French kid of Jewish descent who decided to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1940, at the age of 13, and then rose through the religious ranks until he was named Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. (An impressive achievement, even if he couldn’t achieve quite as highly as the protagonist of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Zeidlus the Pope.”) Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger on Christians and Jews (Paulist, September) collects his statements, from lectures and interviews, on the subject of his personal religious journey, as well as his perspectives on Zionism, interfaith initiatives, and the Holocaust he narrowly eluded.

In contrast to Lustiger, who eventually had a rather wide audience to whom he could express his feelings on such issues, Edith Stein was murdered at Auschwitz and didn’t get to weigh in on the question of whether she should or should not be beatified. A shapeshifter during her life—born Jewish in 1891, she was more or less an atheist when she wrote a philosophy dissertation under Edmund Husserl and worked with Martin Heidegger; in the 1920s, she converted to Catholicism and became a nun. Her story, and the debate about her sainthood—which the Anti-Defamation League staunchly opposed—are explored by a number of scholars a 1994 collection, edited by Harry James Cargas and newly available in paperback: The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein (University Press of America, September).

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The rise of these two people, who had been born Jewish, to crucial administrative and theological positions within the Catholic hierarchy might appear a trifle unusual, but the phenomenon of Jews professing their faith in Christ was, by then, nothing new. In The Emergence of the Hebrew Christian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Brill, September), Michael R. Darby—who received a PhD in Theology from the University of Wales in 2005 and is not the identically named economist—describes how institutions founded by “Jewish believers in Christ” flourished in England in the same century that produced Fagin, Melmotte, Daniel Deronda, and Disraeli.

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Stranger still: Interfaith transformations weren’t always just a matter of Jews embracing Christ out of faith or social savvy. Some European Christians have taken the unusual and somewhat hazardous step of renouncing their faith so as to become Jewish. John Davis, a historian of modern Italy, describes one such group in The Jews of San Nicandro (Yale, October). Beginning when a lapsed Catholic cobbler embraced Judaism in a small Italian town in the 1920s, the tale of these new Jews ends in the present, when a small community of their descendants persists in Israel. If nothing else, their journey suggests that Uganda’s Abuyadaya and the Jews of Iquitos, Peru, aren’t wholly unique.

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Occasionally, Jews and Christians manage to get along just fine, without blurring the boundaries between them very much. Such is the case of the American Jewish conductor Gilbert Levine and Pope John Paul II; Levine recounts their “spiritual friendship” in The Pope’s Maestro (Jossey-Bass, October), which begins with Levine searching Kazimierz, in Krakow, for traces of his family’s history. For his loyalty to the pope, and his efforts on behalf of the church’s causes, Levine earned knighthood from the Vatican’s Order of St. Gregory the Great—but that didn’t require him to renounce Judaism.

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One can renounce Judaism, of course, without embracing some other organized religion. Bay Area radio host and English professor Michael Krasny, for one, has drifted away from the youthful fervor—in his Cleveland boyhood, he recalls, he “led services and chanted Hebrew prayers like a kid smitten, which I was, with Elvis … I tried to sound like a rock-and-roll cantor”—but he has not substituted some other religious absolutism for his eroded faith in a Jewish God. In Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest (New World, October), Krasny explains how he wound up committed to “the doubt and skepticism, the certainty or uncertainty of uncertainty recognized by agnostics.”

Krasny notes that contemporary religious figures understand their faiths as means of “detachment from ego”; Lawrence Kushner offers a perfect example of this position. Organizing a collection of remarks on sundry topics drawn from his decades of rabbinical service, he realized that “many of them share a common theme”: the idea that “the real reason for religion is to keep your ego under control.” He titles the book, accordingly, I’m God, You’re Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego (Jewish Lights, October). If he’s right, the number of ostensibly religious authors, of all faiths, vying for attention in the literary marketplace—with just as much implicit egotism as their secular and atheist peers—suggests that religion might not be doing its job very effectively.

NOTE: This column originally attributed authorship of the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People to the wrong person. It was written by Harold Kushner.